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Professional development presentation
I recently delivered a presentation titled “Explaining the groundswell: harnessing social technologies for productivity” for a campus-wide professional development opportunity. While it was advertised as a social networking how-to, I shifted the presentation to showcase how we got to the point where social networking is relevant.
I have two versions of the presentation that are available for download. The first is just a PDF of the slides, the second is a Flash movie with a voice over which is recommended for on-campus viewing only. If you were unable to attend the presentation the second version will help understand the slides.
As promised, here are a list of links to the social networks that I talked about. Again, the best way to learn how to use them is to dive in head first and start playing around.
Browsers
- Firefox
- Google Chrome (not supported for campus Web applications)
- Flock
RSS
Social Networking Applications
- Blogging platforms:
- Digg
- Flickr
- uStream
- Ning
- Twitter (you can follow my updates here)
- Twitter Apps
- Google Docs
Working smarter, not harder: twitter
This is the second edition of the Working smarter, not harder series. This series helps to showcase some of the things that we are doing on our Web site that you may not know about. For this edition we are going to do an overview of the Web 2.0 service twitter.
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you to post 140 character “tweets” to tell people what you are doing. Your tweets are updated on your personal page on their site and also delivered to all of your followers. Interaction with twitter isn’t limited to using their Web site either. You can use a variety of twitter clients including applications like twhirl or TweetDeck. You can also make updates using an instant messaging application or via a cell phone by sending a text message (SMS).
Why 140 characters?
140 characters is the same number of characters that you can send via text message from a cell phone. The idea of the service is not to write an essay of what you are currently doing, but to give short, simple updates.
Why does anyone care what I’m doing?
Telling everyone what you are doing is one application of twitter. There are million different applications of twitter. For example you could use twitter to arrange a meet-up at a conference, while not calling every single attendee. Obviously this is less invasive then calling everyone.
Tags
Using the “@” character sends a response to someone. This is a nice way to direct a comment to someone. Users can also define their own hash tags to use and keep track of similar items. An example would be #iowaflood which showcased all of the tweets about the Iowa Floods. For our upcoming eduWeb conference, we have the hash tag of #eduweb2008.
Feedback
You could also user twitter is to post your thoughts, or gather feedback from your followers. There is a group of higher education Web developers/managers/marketers that use twitter as a tool to exchange ideas. Brad Ward from Butler posted on the squaredpeg blog about how he polled his twitter followers (using the @ character of course) to determine the best way to contact incoming freshmen about welcome week. In less than an hour he had responses from five other people.
Syndication
As you know, we have a news Web site that showcases what is going on around campus and upcoming events. We also have information that is constantly coming out of the sports information office. All of this information is then tweeted to the Central College twitter account via the RSS feeds from those web sites. This allows anyone that is following Central College to have another way to get more information about what is happening. While it’s success may be limited, it is another contact point with our audiences.
While twitter is definitely on the cutting edge of what our prospective students may or may not be doing online, it allows us another opportunity to interact with a variety of audiences. There are probably a million different uses for twitter, some of which we haven’t even though of yet.
A few of our colleagues from Central are already using twitter:
Take some time to set up an account and follow me (http://twitter.com/run4central). I’ll be sure to give you a proper welcome!
Lastly, take a look at this video on Brad’s epic iPhone adventure and how the twitter comments kept him going in his search for an iPhone on launch day.
Working smarter, not harder: RSS
We haven’t posted in a while so I developed the “working smarter, not harder” series to demonstrate some of the ways that you can use the Web more effectively and to highlight some of the features of the Central College Web site that you might not have known about. RSS has been around for a while, but until recently it hasn’t been easy to use.
Introduction
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and provides you with the ability to keep tabs on tons of sites without actually visiting each and every site. This is especially handy for all of those Web sites that you visit every day to see if there are any updates. By using an RSS feed you can subscribe, and be notified whenever there is new content to read. Some feed owners even include all of the text in their RSS feed so that you don’t even need to visit the site. Central has three RSS feeds (campus news, Central College Abroad and athletics) that are available for you to subscribe to.
RSS is coded in XML which is used to define exactly what content is included in an RSS feed. One example of XML that isn’t an RSS feed would be the weather module on myCentral. It collects weather data from the National Weather Service and then parses the XML feed to display the handy dandy weather module.
How do I use RSS?
The first thing that you will need is a feed reader. Before you get too excited about installing another piece of software on your computer, take a look at some of these options:
- Outlook
- Outlook 2007 allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds through your email client.
- iGoogle
- iGoogle is Google’s customized homepage that is available to anyone that has a Google account. If you have a gmail account, you have access to this customized homepage. If you don’t have an account, signup here. You can also add different widgets besides RSS feeds.
- Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox
- Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox allow you to bookmark feeds. They then show you the content in your Web browser and alert you via your bookmarks folder if there is new content. In Firefox the process is much the same, except that Firefox calls them smart bookmarks.
How do I know if a site has an RSS feed?
There are variety of ways to see if an RSS feed is available on a site. For example this blog has the RSS logo on the right side of the page with the subscribe text to show that there is a feed available. An easier way to see if there is an RSS feed available for a site is to look for the RSS icon in your browser. By clicking on the RSS Icon, you can see your options for subscribing.
How do I start using RSS feeds?
Below is a quick tutorial on how to subscribe to one of the RSS feeds that we have available on the Central College Web site. There are many other ways to subscribe to feeds, but to keep the playing field level for everyone on campus we’ll use Outlook 2007.
- Using Internet Explorer go to the Central College homepage at www.central.edu.
- In the top right of your screen you will see the RSS icon like this:
- Click on the icon and you will be taken to a page that shows the RSS feed.
- Copy the address that is in the address bar (http://www.central.edu/news/rssFeed.cfm).
- Go to Outlook and right click on RSS feeds in your mail folder.
- Select “Add new RSS feed…” and a dialog box will open.
- Paste the address that you copied earlier and select “add.”
- Outlook will prompt you to confirm that you want to add the RSS feed. Select “Yes” to confirm that you wish to subscribe to the feed.
- You now have subscribed to the feed and every time there is a news story available from the Central College Web site you will be notified through Outlook.
If you want to, you can repeat this process to add the athletics RSS feed and the Central College Abroad RSS feeds if you are interested.
Conclusion
Hopefully you found adding RSS feeds pretty straightforward. Now take a few seconds to think about all of the sites that you visit every day. What if you didn’t have to navigate to all of those different sites, but instead were notified when they posted new information? How much time would that save you? Below are just a few sites that I keep tabs on that are specific to my job. Each site has an RSS feed that saves me the time of checking them each day:
