Impressions Scholarcast

My students will love the service provided by WordPressDirect that generates blogs complete with many posts in a matter of minutes. Simple provide a blog title and subtitle, contact details and a few keywords that you would like your blog to cover. Indicate how often you would like new blog entries to be generated, and then choose a website address to host your blog. WordPressDirect then generates the blog on WordPress.com. By manipulating a few settings the blog entries are generated for you by searching popular sites such as YouTube and Yahoo Answers.

In five minutes I created a blog about Web 2.0 educational technology and asked for new entries to be added every 12 hours. See what you think, the address is http://edtechweb.ruqqa.com/

Check out the YouTube videos to see if they are believable.

I can hear the gnashing of teeth from the serious bloggers of my acquaintance.

[via Mashable]

I have to admit I have been neglecting Sandy lately but back at the turn of the year for a few months she proved invaluable. She became even more valuable when she integrated herself into both Windows Live Messenger and Twitter.

Now comes some good and bad news delivered via Twitter of course. The bad: Sandy and (Stikkit) are to close on 8 December, the IP being bought by Twitter. The good: the lead Sandy developer, Rael Dornfest, is joining the Twitter team and I expect to see some Sandy-like features in Twitter soon.

Happy holidays, Sandy, you deserve it.

I don’t know why it has taken me so long to discover the features of PollDaddy for conducting and embedding polls and surveys. After all PollDaddy is part of Automattic which runs this WordPress blogging service. I suppose those around me have always used SurveyMonkey which appears to be the market leader.

One nice feature of the free PollDaddy service is the embedding feature, so here’s a little poll for you all to consider:

Fellow tweeter Des Walsh alerted me to a post by Forrester’s Stephen Noble where their consumer technographics data is used as the basis of several reports. Stephen has extracted the Australian data and published it as another expensive Forrester report. However his post gives us a few of the surprising findings. The one which might be useful to me is:

Well, I was expecting use of social technologies to drop off with age. And it does drop off with age, but not uniformly. Some social activities — such as creating content or joining social networks — fall away dramatically. However, others are common in all age groups. In particular, 46% of online adults in the Older Boomers and Seniors cohort consume some form of social media, whether it’s watching other peoples’ videos, reading other peoples’ blogs, or looking at other people’s photos. For many marketers chasing this demographic, that’s an audience too large to ignore.

I am becoming involved in a wellness project looking at the effectiveness of social networks for distributing preventative healthcare information to older member so society. From the above finding it looks like social networks might work for getting the message out to the older boomers and seniors. Getting them to interact and then contribute looks like a harder task.

I offer up the following quote by Paul Miller from his blog post to prompt discussion. Being in the twilight of my university career I probably sway to the view that the Web 2.0 disruption will profoundly change the operation of teaching universities. I suspect degree teaching will increasingly be focussed within institutions where the only research is directed to improving the teaching itself. What do you think?

… The student of Harvard or Oxford or ANU isn’t buying a degree. They’re buying an experience, and a head-start on the populating of their address book. There will continue to be a premium market offering for this, although it will need to evolve to meet a changing demand profile.

The lower end of the Higher Education market (and, indeed, a significant cohort of Further Education/ Community College-type institutions) have the most to gain from disruption, deploying their lower costs, economies of scale and community locations to good effect in wrapping a cost-effective support and assessment package around mediated delivery of the ‘best’ online content sourced from top-flight institutions via iTunes U, OpenLearn, the OpenCourseWare Consortium and others. If ‘all’ you want is a degree, why pay more?

Superficially, at least, these disruptors can probably project a ‘better’ education than those above them in the institutional food chain. The tutor at a local community college is probably happier to point their class at a video lecture from Cambridge or MIT than their peer at an institution with a more inflated opinion of its own importance. The young lecturer at a mid-range teaching institution has their own reputation to establish, and this takes precedence to pointing their students at the lectures of others. Their more established colleague down the corridor doesn’t agree with those ‘odd’ ideas from Cambridge anyway, and is competing for attention and recognition in ways that again run counter to simply pointing their students toward third party content. The motivations of the teacher, the needs of the learner, and the maximising of institutional return on (staff) investment are in direct opposition to one another.

Once again the post, Do we need Open Educational Resources (OER)?, by Leigh Blackall puts forward a point of view with which I immediately resonate:

Our educational services are locked up in Blackboard, and our teachers are too afraid to professionally network online. Online education is a dark web. Stepping up to the plate then is Open Education services like Wikieducator, but bringing another set of restrictive criteria that effectively keep people in a twilight zone – adherence to one form of copyright.

I would love to have the opportunity to make public the wikis and blogs I am using within my own institution’s Blackboard LMS. This day fortunately is coming ever nearer.