Wednesday 28 September 2011

Not a thing ...


Between the Facebook furore, and Avos' "upgrade" to Delicious which has essentially wiped out the carefully curated sets of useful open-web sources I'd assembled for my students, I'm not really feeling the cloud-based techno-joy this week!

(I *know* this is the risk we take when we commit our energy, our work, our words and pictures and communities to projects and products that will be bought and sold and monetised above our heads, but so often the opportunities are worth the risks, at least for a while.)

The Delicious thing could not have been more comically badly timed if they'd done it too us on purpose, though! The webstats say that the curated links master page isn't used that often, but, sure enough, Delicious manages to set all our links to private while it was busy loosing the tags, bundles and associated meta data, and I get two emails within a couple of hours from students who'd fallen into the newly created information pothole.

Those two students got a hand-picked list of resources (open web, subscription online, and physical) and hopefully the delay while I put the lists together didn't throw their plans too much. On the one hand, that's a better service: on the other, the hypothetical students who hit the dead links but *didn't* get in touch, have zilch.

Reviewing and re-thinking that curated-web sources section has been on my long range to do list for a while, waiting patiently in line behind my day-to-day job, and the One Big Thing project, and the slightly-more-urgent projects. It's just jumped up that list, somewhat. At least, reviewing the process has.

I'm not sure I want to invest the time it will take to pick an alternative and import my back-up file somewhere else until I've taken some time to review, and to think about how best my curating web resources might help my students find the information they need. Is this something I even need to do? What's the best way to do it with the tools I have now, vs the ones I had four or so years back when I started using Delicious because that was the best fit at the time?

The short term fix of just evaporating the links on our site, at least for the time being, is really tempting. If nothing else, to give myself time to reflect and review before I react.

* Photo by macieklew, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Thursday 15 September 2011

Small things

Small frustrations - seeing links to an interesting Google Search Education Webinar after the event.

The links all go to the Webinar page (because they were written before the event) - which dead-ends.

Would it be so hard to put the line "Presentation will be archived here" in the description, automatically, always, for every webinar, so that people don't dead-end?

I mean, I know I found that link to the archive in minutes, but I had to *assume* that there would be an archive somewhere to find it, and what do marketing people say about assume?

(Irony factor of mentally lecturing Google on making information easily findable - high. Yes, I know.)

It does prompt me - again - to keep trying to see our own online content without my background knowledge, to try and avoid leading people into similar dead ends on our, much smaller, scale.

And to find an hour to sit down and listen to the presentation.

Wednesday 14 September 2011

CPD23 update and things#8 & #9

I could have predicted that I was going to fall off the CPD23 wagon during August, but I have managed to squeeze in various bits of progress, though, as well as keeping all the other balls I'm juggling up in the air.

For example, I've given Evernote (thing #9) a good solid test run over the past weeks, and it's currently fitting very neatly into my work flows. Specifically, I'm one of team of three keeping our program's Facebook page stocked with several-posts-a-day about free and interesting things going on in and around London. Being able to stockpile webpages and articles in Evernote as I find them - whether that's at home, at work, or out and about using my phone - has been a real boon.

(I already did the 'taking photos of notices to remind myself' thing, so having my photos turned into easier-to-find-again notes that I don't have to transliterate by hand is also easy win.) I've got in the habit of titling each 'note' in that notebook with the date in YYYYMMDD format, so a quick sort by title pulls the events-happening-soonest to the top, and also makes weeding old notes out very easy.

Two other organisational tools I wouldn't want to be without are spiral bound notebooks, because I've yet to find an electronic to-do list manager that works for me better than my paper process, and Google Calender (thing #8).

I can't really claim Google Calender as a CPD23 discovery, though, as it's been about three years since I gave up on paper diaries, and started layering up Google Calenders. Being able to toggle various 'layers' in and out is a fantastic tool for me, for planning my time, for scheduling both professionally and personally, and for keeping track of 'things to have in mind' but which don't warrant a firm scheduled slot on my main calendar, but which I want to be able to layer in easily when it's appropriate. To be honest, I wasn't particularly sold on keeping my calendar online until a friend of mine pointed out that you could have *multiple* calenders, and that was the killer feature for me.

We also started using Google Calenders for program calenders for use with the public and with students just over a year ago - all our students are on Google Apps for Education accounts, so making it easy for them to subscribe to our program events, and the calenders relevant to their specific classes seemed like an obvious step to take.

_________

As the new semester beds down and the teething difficulties with the new library get fixed, it's starting to look as though I might be able to draw breath, get back to blogging more regularly, and try and catch up with the program before it draws to a close. Here's hoping!

* Photo by Incurable Hippie, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

Thursday 1 September 2011

Loads of links

This post is basically a links list - 100% of our students arrived with a laptop, tablet, or other personal computing device, which made me think about the sites I have at my fingers tips on mine.

These are my personal - I stress, personal - recommendations for the essential sites to bookmark, subscribe to, or otherwise have to hand for tackling London.


Getting Around

TfL - for the journey planner, and for the all-important disruption maps, especially when making weekend plans, when the engineering works kick into high gear.

GoogleMaps - obvious, but true. I still carry an A-Z sometimes, but now I have a smartphone...

WalkIt: London - my other go-to for walking directions, especially as the less busy and lower pollution choices often turns up good alternative routes through parks, or using the riverside.

What's On

Time Out : London - again, obvious, but for good reason! Tip: once you have searched for something - say, events in the category music, happening in the next 7 days - you'll be able to select 'Free' to limit the results, which is a great tool for turning up free activities and events.

Londonist - huge sprawling team-run blog on all things London. Subscribe for a steady flow of news, reviews, and what's-on posts.

London's not short of fantastic opportunities for free things to do, but I haven't found one single 'freebies' website that I could recommend as The One - I check in on a few, and generally do a little searching around to confirm events, particularly recurring events which may keep showing up in the listings long after the events themselves cease. http://www.freelondonevents.co.uk/ and Free London Listings are the two I use most.

I also connect directly with venues and organisations who host events I'm likely to be interested in - Twitter, Facebook and mailing lists bring me regular updates on things I might want to see and do. There are some suggestions for venues to try in the London on a Budget: Entertainment Edition post I wrote for the program blog here.

Meetup.com can be useful for tracking down people who share common interests, and if you're interested in photography, Flickr's London Meetup Group can be a good source of information. (Safety note - if you're going somewhere to meet up with people you don't know, take the usual precautions for your safety - take a friend, meet somewhere public, let people know where you're going and when you expect to be back, etc.)

News & Weather (online)


- BBC Weather for Central London
- BBC News
- The Guardian

Suggestions for essential sites I've missed welcome in the comments!

* Photo by , used under Creative Commons, with thanks.

SpringBen