The next workshop 28 April

Social Media workshops.



Come and learn! You are invited to attend the second running of our FREE social media workshops on Tuesday evenings at the Princes Street Community Learning Centre.

• Making sense of social media, what is it and how can I use it?
• How to blog. Develop an online presence, network with others, and create your own websitein under 10 minutes!
• Getting fancy with Youtube, podcasting, Flickr photos and online slide presentations!
• Wikis! They're quick and a great way to learn new stuff.
• Free software - save yourself a couple of thousand dollars hey!
• The mash up! Bringing it all together, rounding it all off nicely, its up to you to make the most of it.

Tuesday nights at 6-8pm sharp

The Princes Street Community Learning Centre

Cnr Princes Street & Moray Place Dunedin

Commencing Tuesday 28th April 2009

Contact: EDCEnquiries@tekotago.ac.nz

or

Txt 021 736 539

Workshop 5, podcasting and then bringing it all together

Jean has requested a look at podcasting.. I think that would be good to check out for an hour before we tie the whole workshop off with a review of this distribution re centralisation method of using the Internet.

• So on Tuesday night, lets start by opening up our GoogleReader and seeing what everyone has been up to.
• Then open your blog from your reader and write a quite post that links out to things that other's in the group have done that inspires you.
• We'll spend about 30 minutes on that before taking a look at podcasting. I'll explain what it is and do a demo, then its over to you for an hour.
• Finally, in our last 30 minutes we'll try and get our heads around the idea of distributed networking, or "bringing it all together".

Basically - when you starting thinking of the Internet as one platform - like your Office software is one platform, then you know you are well on your way to developing solid network literacy.You have your videos over there, and there, you have your images here and there, you have your audio there, and your documents there and there, and it all ties together on your blog. It doesn't have to be your blog, but a blog rounds off all that you are learning nicely. Some people use Delicious to bring it all together, others use Facebook, or iGoogle - these are different tools that can be used for teh same purpose dependingon your preference. Tools to bring it all together.

The point is that you should be starting to think of the Internet as one big platform that you spread out all over.. and once you are spread out, or distributed over it, you set up a tool like a blog to manage it.

So this Tuesday night we will take a look at podcasting. Try to bring a headset with you for that, so we can record audio with the microphone. Podcasting doesn't have to be only audio.. maybe you want to podcast with video? In that case bring a web cam.

Oh, and another thing.. check out Phil Kerr's blog.. he's back blogging - sort of :)

Workshop 4: Reviewing RSS and multi media, then looking at free software

You know, I get this funny feeling that we've forgotten that one thing I said to remember.. the Google Reader. Last week I asked a few people if they were checking their Google Reader and the responses where on the whole questioning what the RSS reader is for. So I think we need to review some of week 1.

As Sarah Stewart said once, blogging has more to do with reading then it does writing.. or something like that.. and I couldn't agree more. Beverly echoes the sentiment in her blog post recently. I spend most of my blogging time keeping on top of the 200 or so feeds I am subscribed to. (It sure beats the Sunday papers!) And from time to time, the reading, looking, viewing and listening I do when I go through my reader is the stuff that triggers me to want to write a blog post about something. It might be a comment about something, a shout out to a great idea, or a more academic deconstruction of some publication, what ever it is, it is usually always inspired by reading.

When I do post about what others have done, those others notice that and sometimes they respond. This is the networking bit, and when done well is what leads to what many call networked learning. When we manage to build a professional relationship with others through this sort of expressing and ourselves and connecting with others, that's when all this blogging stuff starts to make sense. That's when we start to get a deeper understanding of the value of social media to personalised learning and collaborative productivity. But it takes time and investment, 2 things we teachers are poor on.

So I think we should review RSS. Have a look who and what we are subscribed to, leave comments on those blogs, and maybe even write about what we have read on our own blogs. Depending on who and how you do it, this practice can lead to great things.

Then for some enriching fun, we should have another look at adding multi media to our blogs. Its easy, you know that, but it goes beyond embedding youtube movies that's for sure. We can do audio, maps, readings, charts, pretty much anything these days can be embedded in a blog. Its fun and makes us look like media experts.

Finally, if we have time, lets take a look at free and open source software - if only to become aware of what it is, how it works and how it relates to social media. In fact, I would go as far to say that free and open source software is the grand daddy movement that brought us the social media we have today.

Hope to see you tonight :)

Wikis are quick but I'll be late

Hi everyone. Tonight we have a workshop on wikis! But it might just as well be a review seeing as very few in the group appear to be practicing through the week. The workshop starts t 6pm as usual, but I will be about 30-40 minutes late as my flight gets in just before 6. Looking forward to seeing everyone, and hearing how last week went.

Workshop 2 Getting all multi media

It was a bit of a messy start to workshop 2 I'm sorry, we got through it though, even if we were all a bit flustered by he end of it. I find this video on Mike's blog reminds us why we're all here. And this video on Jean's blog perfectly captures how it all feels at the moment.

Thanks to Jill for stepping up to the plate and showing us Delicious. I'm pretty sure everyone can appreciate it is a valuable tool to have in the social media swag.

As an example here are my Delicious bookmarks for:

Tagging (that's delicious)
Blogs
Social media generally
Vlogging (that's video blogging)

Jenny asked me to provide videos to help learn about this social media thing. Here's a playlist on Social Media I've been building...



I don't have one at the ready for "How to Blog" videos.. but I reckon that should be a group activity. As a group we should search for "How to Blog" videos on both Youtube and Blip.tv If we find good videos we should embed them on our blogs. At least 3 each hey!?

But videos only tell us so much. It might pay to Google search "How to Blog" and see how many print out instructions you can find. Blog those links too. Lordy knows you guys need the blogging practice :)

See you Tuesday week! I'll be 30 minutes later than 6pm.. my flight gets in at 6pm on Tuesday night, but I'll be in a cab directly to the CLC to see how we are getting on and to introduce WIKIS!!!



Delicious is a very powerful tool and it is hard to illustrate how useful it is. Try and spend some time getting to know it, even start using it.. its very useful for keeping track of websites, preparing reading lists, research, collaborative research, information management, generating RSS feeds, search, and much more.

Workshop 1: a blog, online bookmarking, and an RSS reader is everything you need

We had the first workshop on Tuesday night, and didn't we set the pace early! These workshops will be full throttle, flying by the seat of our pants, jam as much in the 2 hours as we can. That said, I'll try to work out activities and such so that people get a chance to move a bit at their own pace and in their own direction.

Below is a review of what we did, as well as what you need to prepare for next week:

Set up a blog

So we all set up blogs. Here's the list I have:

1. http://jilldsblog.blogspot.com/
2. http://marymchugh.blogspot.com/
3. http://jennysflexilearningblog.blogspot.com/
4. http://pkp-rampant.blogspot.com/
5. http://rogerandjudy.blogspot.com/
6. http://beverlyspills.blogspot.com/
7. http://fmbodyworks.blogspot.com/
8. http://antipodesnz.blogspot.com/
9. http://mpryde2.blogspot.com/
10. http://level3cookery.blogspot.com/
11. http://biffyslife.blogspot.com/
12. http://jeanssocialmediaclass.blogspot.com/

We all practiced logging out and back in (good way to sort out user name and password issues). We all practiced writing a basic post, and adjusting the blog settings. Some of us quickly discovered the social side of blogging and left comments on each other's blogs.

Google Readers

Next we all set up Google Readers and subscribed to as many people's blogs in the workshop as we had time. I'm pretty sure I have everyone's in the list above, but if I missed you please leave a comment here.

Social bookmarking

We ran out of time for this, but I did quickly show delicious - a social bookmarking tool, and basically explain how it works. Jill gave it a glowing endorsement as she has been using it for some time now. Jill, if you're reading, perhaps you could write up something about Delicious on your blog? Something that explains what it is, and even how we can get started using it? Remember, often this information already exists so if you search and find a good video, or a good wikipedia article or other online resource, see if you can work out how to link to them ;)

Here's a video on how to set up a blog (for review) and in it is a brief mention on how to make hyperlinks:



What's next?

enrich your online self with multi media (youtube, flickr, slideshare, second life, etc)

I'll be showing you how to embed video, images and slideshows in your blog, as well as how to make your own videos, pictures and slide shows!

To prepare, see if you can put aside 55 minutes and watch this video: An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube. This video is a presentation that was given to the Library of Congress in the USA, and helps explain some aspects of social media - focusing on Youtube. Remember to press play and then press pause and let the red bar load some before you play it through. The video will only play as far as the red bar has loaded. Forget it if you're on dial up.. poor soul.



What to bring

Try and bring along some of the following items. If you have 2 or more of one of these, bring both in case someone doesn't have one:

Headphones (preferably the ones with a microphone on them)
Webcam
Digital camera (fully charged and with the cables you need to connect it to a computer)

Part 1 workshops have started

I've started running social media workshops on Tuesday nights, 6-8pm at the Princes Street Community Learning Centre. We had a full house last week, and we spent the time getting a social media over view, using my own online presence as a basis, but responding to questions and comments as we went.

From blogs to video blogs - social interaction is important
I used the blog as the central defining element of social media - specifically its constantly updating, always new posting aspect of a website. With that, we looked at video "blogs" as Youtube User Channels, repeating the feature description of a regularly updated website, but introducing more of the social features, like contacts, bookmarked videos (favourites), comments made, visible profile, recommended videos. We then looked at Blip.tv as an alternative to Youtube. With the social tools highlighted, I stressed the point that passive consumption of media through search was not very effective as way of finding and engaging with social media.. and that making personal connections with people in these spaces was the best way to uncover the richness in social media.

Origins of social media
The birthplace of social media online is arguably OurMedia.org, and Archive.org. at the time OurMedia launched on the back of Archive.org.. it seemed to spark a flurry of commercial services such as Youtube, Flickr and other media sharing services that offered 'unlimited' file hosting and communication features. So we looked at the non-commercial side and origins to social media, starting with Ourmedia, then Archive, and then of course Wikipedia!

Copyright
Conversation about copyright emerged, and we looked at Creative Commons licensing.

The RSS News Reader
I repeated the 2 important features of social media:
1. Websites that regularly update with new media
2. Social interaction features

and then introduced the 3 feature that brings it all together in a usable way, and so as to help facilitate connection and interaction:

3. The RSS News Reader. Perhaps the most important tool for engaging in social media, the newsreader enables people to subscribe to websites that regularly update with new media, and bring any new updates into a central and personalised website. If something of interest arrives, then the user can click through to where the media comes from and engage by way of the site's social tools. This sort of interaction often results in personal connections over time, and leads to new websites (or individuals) to subscribe to and follow.

Other stuff
We briefly looked at Flickr and SecondLife and mentioned CCMixter. There are many many social media sites people use, most people use several. I made mention of Facebook and pointed out the unfortunate features of Facebook that sever the potential connections across different services. (To connect with Facebook, you must join Facebook, a kind of market cornering strategy on the part of some social networking sites).

Learning skills
So after that hour and a bit overview we tried to decide in what order we might get our hands dirty and start using this stuff. It seems that to most people in the workshops, social media is a very new concept, and so they might prefer to follow my lead. I warned everyone therefore that in the long term they might come to see that my lead wasn't the best path for them to follow, but none-the-less they will pick up skills and considerations that will be transferable to what ever social media path they might like to follow later.

So the next few weeks will be focused on the following:

1. a blog, online bookmarking, and an RSS reader is everything you need
2. enrich your online self with multi media (youtube, flickr, slideshare, second life, etc)
3. wikis! They're quick and they're organised
4. free software - save yourself a couple of thousand dollars hey!
5. the mash up! Making it all come together.