We hope you’ve been enjoying the 11½ Things so far. This is the penultimate week, but don't worry if you are behind, the blog won't suddenly disappear at the end of the six weeks, you can always catch up in your own time. Over the last few weeks we’ve been exploring tools to share website bookmarks, citations, presentations, documents and other files online. This week we’re going to focus on tools that not only allow you to share, but allow you to collaborate on a piece of work.
Wikis
Wikis are the most obvious example of a Web 2.0 tool that allows people to collaborate on a piece of work. The word 'wiki' comes from a Hawaian word meaning 'fast'. A wiki is a webpage that can be edited by anyone or a defined set of people from within the Web browser, no other editing tools are required. As it's all stored online and they often allow you to upload documents and other files, they can be a useful tool for groups collaborating on a piece of work.
The best known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, where anyone can go in and add or amend an entry and anyone can see the entries you have made. The lack of editorial control can make the information in Wikipedia unreliable so they have editorial guidance in place to try to ensure the quality of the entries and you can look back to see what changes have been made to a page. For some pages editorial control is restricted to registered users or even particular individuals. If you are setting up your own wiki you can usually set it to allow only certain people to access it and/or edit it.
Wiki software is available to download to your PC or you can use an online wiki tool. Freely available online wiki tools include WikiSpaces(which offers free spaces for higher education), WetPaintand PBWorks. There are lots more examples out there. You might like to explore WikiMatrix, which is a site that compares wiki sites.
Did you know? UCL has its own wiki serviceand Library Services has a number of wikis set up, available to library usersor which can only be viewed or edited by Library Services staff, or a select group of library staff.
Why might researchers, academics and clinicians want to use wikis?
As with sharing social media tools, wikis can be used to share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience, to engage with the public, to invite comments and feedback.
To invite other people to contribute their knowledge on a topic – ‘crowdsourcing’.
For open peer review of articles.
To invite updates for systematic reviews.
To provide online collaborative portals of data, information or other resources in a particular field which may be used as reference sources.
For sharing and developing educational materials.
As a forum for debate and discussion, and a place to keep a record of discussions.
To facilitate group work on projects by their students, increase student engagement or have students read and review the work of their peers.
Want to know more about wikis as a medium for publishing? Read this article on wikis as a publishing platform in medicine.
Google docs
Google docs is an example of an Office 2.0 tool. Office 2.0 refers to online applications that allow you to create documents, spreadsheets etc. Instead of using software installed on your individual computer you are using software that is hosted in a remote ‘cloud’. This means you don’t need to be on your own computer to access your files, you just need a computer with an Internet connection. You also don’t need to worry about software upgrades and because everything is available over the Internet it facilitates sharing and collaboration. The downsides can be that these applications currently have limited functionality compared to Microsoft Office, for example, and you are dependent on a decent Internet connection to access your files.
Google Docsallows you to share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, presentations and drawings online. You can create them from scratch in Google Docs or upload them and amend them in Google Docs. This can be really useful for people who work in different departments or even different institutions who are collaborating on a piece of work and need to work on documents together.
Thing 9: See if you can find any examples of wikis that might be of use to our user groups: academics, researchers, students or clinicians. You could try searching Google, searching the websites of HE institutions, or searching the literature for articles about good examples, or finding them any other way you can. If you find other good ways to identify wiki examples, why not share this information on your blog?
Thing 10: This week, instead of (or as well as if you wish!) sharing a useful resource via your blog you are asked to share it via a wiki. You should have received an email on Friday 29 July inviting you to join the 11½ Things wiki. Follow the instructions in the email and then on the front page of the wiki to become a member of the wiki and contribute an example to the pages on the wiki.
Optional extras
Optional ‘Thing’: Have a go at creating a document in Google Docs and sharing it with a colleague or a fellow 11½ Things participant.
Scheduling meetings or events
Researchers often work in groups and may wish to arrange meetings, decide on deadlines or inform each other about conferences or other relevant events. Clinicians may have similar requirements if working together, for example to discuss a particular case or work on an audit or guideline. We are all used to using the Oracle calendar system (soon to be replaced with the Outlook calendar as part of Live@UCL) to help with all of these things, but how would we do it with a group that included members from another institution, for example? Social media tools are there to help us again. Here are some examples you might like to explore, although there are many others out there:
Google calendar: As with many Google products, probably the lead player in this area. Lets you share your calendar with anyone, and invite people to events in your calendar.
Doodle: A free tool for scheduling events between a group of people. It works by creating a poll which is sent out to the people you want to meet with by email. They then respond to the poll so you can select the most popular date and time.
Meet-o-matic: Another free meeting scheduler that uses a simple web-form and emails people to ask them to select a preferred date and time.
tungle.me: Another scheduling application that can sync with your online calendar, eg. Outlook or Google Calendar.
Did you know? Virtual Research Environments The development of online tools such as those we've been exploring has initiated various projects to create Virtual Research Environments (VREs), a set of online tools and resources designed specifically to support the research process. They allow collaboration amongst researchers as well as ways of managing and manipulating data. In the UK, JISC is funding various projects to support the development of VREs.
Next week is the last week, and we'll be having some fun with images and audiovisual tools!
We’ve already explored tools that facilitate sharing website bookmarks and citations. This week we’ll be exploring tools that allow you to share presentations, documents and other files online.
Note for WTS users: You will not be able to hear any audio files if you are accessing the following resources via WTS. You may also experience difficulties playing videos on SlideShare and Prezi presentations may be jerky. If you’d like to use a computer where you will have full functionality you could go to a UCL cluster room with Myriad computers or come to the Royal Free Library where we’ll be happy to log you on to a computer.
SlideShare
SlideShare is perhaps the best known, and most widely used, website for sharing presentations, but it also allows you to share documents, PDFs and videos. Presentations can be accompanied by audio to make them ‘slidecasts’. You can add comments and tags to your own presentations and those by other people. SlideShare also allows you to download presentations and re-use or amend them, or simply use them as inspiration for your own presentations.
As with most Web 2.0 applications there is a free version and a premium version, which has more features. SlideShare Pro, for example, allows you to share your presentations privately as well as publicly.
Why might researchers or clinicians want to use SlideShare?
To share presentations with anyone who might not get to see it otherwise, eg. for people unable to attend a conference. SlideShare presentations can easily be embedded into your blog, website, twitter or facebook.
To share and disseminate ideas or reach a wider audience. This could include engaging with the public and on a massive scale.
To invite comments and feedback and so get new ideas to develop their work or make their presentations better.
To make international contacts and network with people with similar work interests.
To download presentations that are relevant to them and re-use or re-mix them.
Prezi
Prezi provides a new and alternative approach to creating presentations. Instead of a linear progression from slide to slide, as you get in PowerPoint, with Prezi you work on a single canvas which you move around or zoom in and out, making for a more dynamic interpretation. It's a web-based package so you create your presentation online but can download it for use offline. For an idea as to what a Prezi presentation looks like, take a look at the presentation we did for this year's summer school session on competencies. (We're not claiming this is a perfect example of the capabilities of Prezi!)
Prezi is freely available, although you can pay for a premium version. With the standard version all slides are automatically made public so you need to take into account copyright rules if including images or screenshots in your presentation. This makes it more suited to some uses than others. eg. you need to be careful about copyrighted images.
As with SlideShare, Prezi presentations can be shared, downloaded and re-worked by others, you can post comments or upload audio files to accompany your presentation. You can also collaborate online with other authors to create a Prezi together, and you can download it and play it offline if you need to present on a computer with no Internet access.
Why might researchers or clinicians want to use Prezi?
Many of the reasons to do with sharing and disseminating presentations are similar to those for SlideShare. In addition Prezi provides an alternative format for presentations, and allows collaborative online working.
Thing 7: Try searching for presentations on SlideShare or Prezi that might be of interest to a researcher, academic, student or clinician in the fields of biomedicine or health (or a subject relevant to your role) to see what kind of presentations are out there.
Thing 8: Write a post on your blog about your experiences of using SlideShare and/or Prezi. You might want to consider some of the following points:
How easy are they to use?
Do you think they are a useful tool for the user groups we are considering?
What might be the issues or concerns that people might have if making their presentations publicly available through these tools? Could plagiarism and the stealing of other people’s work be an issue? Are there any copyright issues? (You might want to explore the support or help sections on the websites for more information about copyright).
Why not try linking to a presentation you find interesting, or even embedding it in your blog post? (see Optional Extras section below for instructions).
Optional extras
SlideShare and Prezi You could try creating your own accounts on SlideShare and/or Prezi, and try uploading or downloading a presentation, or creating one from scratch in Prezi. The Prezi manualhas good instructions on getting started and the following presentation gives some great tips on creating a successful Prezi.
Tips:How to embed presentations in your blog or website
SlideShare and Prezi both allow you to copy and paste HTML code for a presentation into a blog or website. In Blogger you need to view the post in the Edit HTML screen rather than the Compose screen when pasting the code.
SlideShare: From the page for a presentation in SlideShare, click on the Embed link above the slides. Copy the HTML code. Paste this code into your blog post.
Prezi: Click on the Share link below a Prezi and then click on Embed. The HTML code is displayed – click on Copy code to clipboard. Then paste this code into your blog post.
Other tools for sharing presentations, documents and more: SlideShare and Prezi are not the only tools for sharing presentations. Lesser known examples include:
Slide Boom allows you to upload presentations, which can be converted to flash retaining audio and video. Like SlideShare you can search for other presentations and post comments etc.
Scribd.comclaims to be the world’s largest social reading and publishing company. It allows you to share PDF, Word and PowerPoint files.
Screencast.com is designed for business or academic professionals to share multimedia content via the Web.
Did you know? There are various projects and initiatives set up to help facilitate the sharing of educational resources online, not just presentations but any teaching and learning materials that you can use or re-use for free. These are known as Open Education Resources (OER). If you’re interested, why not explore the following links:
OER Commons: Database that allows you to search, browse, evaluate, or discuss over 30,000 high-quality OERs already available on the Web.
The Higher Education Academy and JISC are working in partnership on a HEFCE funded Open Educational Resources Programmewhereby it has been funding various UK OER initiatives, including:
- PORSCHE (Pathways for Open Resource Sharing through Convergence in Healthcare Education), which is exploring ways of sharing healthcare related OERs across the NHS and HE
- ACTOR (Accredited Clinical Teaching Open Resources) project, which is seeking to increase the sharing, repurposing and utilisation of educational development resources for PG Certificate clinical education programmes.
- OER Digital Humanities project, based at UCL.
Last week we looked at social networking, sites that enable you to share thoughts, ideas and opinions. This week we’ll be looking at tools to help you manage and share information, whether online information from websites and social media sites, or more traditional forms of scholarly information such as journal articles and references to books and other publications.
Tagging
Tagging is a system for assigning keywords to web-based content (such as websites, images or blogs) so that you can easily retrieve items on a particular topic and so that others can use your tags to find those items, or choose to assign similar tags to their items. As librarians we may shudder at the thought of there being no controlled vocabulary in the use of tags, but they are a convenient and easy to use tool to help organise information on Web 2.0 sites.
You may have already made use of tags in creating your blog posts in week 1 and 2. When you entered a term in the ‘Labels’ box (if using Blogger) for your blog post you were ‘tagging’ that post. If you didn’t add any tags you can always go back and add them now.
Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a method for saving links to websites that allows you to access your ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favorites’ from anywhere, rather than just within your Web browser on a particular PC, because they are all stored within your online account. You can then organise your bookmarks by adding tags. It becomes ‘social’ because other users can see the tags and browse for websites by the tags that have been assigned to them by other people. That means you can identify websites relevant to you that have already been identified by human beings as being useful sources. This can make a refreshing alternative to sifting through hundreds of search engine results.
Del.icio.us
Del.icio.us is possibly the best known social bookmarking site. In addition to allowing you to save and tag your bookmarks, it lets you see bookmarks other people have made, see how popular they are and see the tags that have been applied to them. You can set up RSS feeds from another Del.icio.us user so you can be alerted when they add a new bookmark. It also allows you to easily share your bookmarks, either by creating a 'network' of Del.icio.us users or by creating a page of links that you can then link to from your own website or blog.
Did you know: If you’ve already heard of Del.icio.us you may have heard rumours that it was to be terminated. Well there’s good news. It’s been taken over by AVOS (the company behind YouTube) who plan to continue Del.icio.us. See Del.icio.us FAQs for more information.
Diigo
Like Delicious, Diigo ("Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff") is a social bookmarking site, allowing you to bookmark webpages, tag them and find other webpages by using other people’s tags. But Diigo does more than that, its aim being to "focus on providing better ways to process, manage, share and discover information" it is a constantly evolving resource, "a research and collaborative research tool on the one hand, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site on the other." See http://www.diigo.com/about.
The additional features you get from Diigo include:
The ability to highlight portions of web pages and attach sticky notes, save these so you can come back to them later and share them with friends and colleagues using groups
News and recommended sites personalised to your interests.
The ability to see who else has bookmarked a page and what similar sites they have bookmarked giving you another avenue for identifying relevant websites. You can search for "people like me" based on similar interests, tags or sites. Diigo then allows social networking allowing you to connect with these people by inviting them to be a ‘friend’, sending them messages, inviting them to join a group or adding them to your watchlist.
The standard version of Diigo is free to register.
For a demonstration of the features of diigo, watch this short video:
Thing 5: Set up an account on Diigo and bookmark, tag and highlight a page and add a sticky note to it.
To set up an account on Diigo:
From the Diigo home page, click on Get Started Now! or on the Join Diigo link to the right of the top menu bar.
Enter your details and click on Continue. You will be sent a confirmation email with a link in it on which you need to click to activate your account.
Once you have clicked on the link in the email, follow the on-screen instructions to add the diigolet to your favourites / links bar or install the Diigo toolbar. The quickest and easiest option is to add the diigolet, but frequent users of Diigo may feel they benefit from installing the toolbar as it has more features (this requires admin rights on your computer). Tip:Diigo works on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. If using Staff WTS, however, you may not be able to capture the bookmarklet in IE – use Firefox instead. It should work fine on Staff WTS 2010. We also had problems making the bookmarklet work on a Windows Vista computer using IE and a computer that had bookmarklets added from lots of other programs. Email us if you are having problems installing the diigolet.
You’re now ready to start adding pages to your library. Go to any website and click on the diigolet on your favorites / links bar. From the toolbar that appears you can choose to highlight text, bookmark it to your Diigo account (including adding tags), add a sticky note, share on twitter, facebook or by email or simply link to your diigo account.
Optional extra: You might like to try investigating using lists on Diigo and searching for other people’s sites using the search box to explore the community library or look for groups or users interested in that topic. You can even add feeds to your Diigo bookmarks so they appear on your blog (look at the options under Tools). We’ve done this on the 11½ Things blog – look to the right under the Blog Archive.
Did you know:
You can migrate bookmarks from Delicious to Diigo
There are iPhone and iPad apps for Diigo which allow you to bookmark sites on the go, or read websites offline.
Social citation-sharing
You could easily use social bookmarking sites to bookmark the webpages of particular journal articles and share them amongst a group of colleagues (bearing in mind access to the full text for colleagues would depend on their subscription or institutional subscription). There are other sites set up, however, that are designed specifically for that purpose and have additional related features. Some of them function as full bibliographic software packages which enable you to insert citations in Word documents and generate a bibliography. Examples include Mendeley and Zotero.
We’re not going to go into detail here because the summer school session on Freely available bibliographic management and collaboration tools running on Friday 15 July is all about these tools. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the session you can check out the presentation, handouts and worksheets on the Summmer School Moodle course.
Thing 6: Post an entry on your blog saying what your impressions are of Diigo, or any other tool mentioned this week, and why you think this tool might be of particular use to researchers, academics or clinicians.
Optional extras:
If you want to know more then have a go at exploring some of the following sites:
Library Thing LibraryThing is a social bookmarking site for book lovers. It allows you to create an online catalogue of books and connects you to other people who have similar collections.
Mendeley, Zotero, CiteULike and EndNote Web Check out the material on social citation software from this week’s summer school session, available on the Summer School Moodle course. There are worksheets to help you explore the resources.
Further information Check out the websites we found on Diigo on social bookmarking.
Well done to everyone for setting up their blogs and for finding such a good range of useful blogs for researchers and clinicians. If you haven't yet registered your blog with us, please send the URL to 11andahalfthings@gmail.com.
This week we're focussing on social, academic and professional networking tools. These are tools that enable to you keep in contact with other people and keep up to date with what they are doing. Many include features such as email and instant messaging, and allow you to upload images and videos. Quite a few of you already use some of these tools, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. We'll explore these and some other tools that might be of interest to academics or clinicians.
There has been some debate about privacy issues on social networking sites, which might make people disinclined to sign up or put them off using them as a tool for their work. Many sites have privacy settings but the point of ‘social media’ is to be social, so if a researcher, academic or clinician is worried about making their work public in this way it's probably not the tool for them.
Twitter
Twitter is sometimes classed as a social networking tool, and we feel it fits in to this week's theme as it is about keeping in touch and networking as well as sharing thoughts and information. Twitter is also defined as a micro-blogging tool, a quick way of widely sharing your thoughts or information in 140 characters or less. Twitter has been reported to have around 200 million followers. Wikipedia provides a good background and history to Twitter.
Why tweet?
Twitter can be used for both dissemination and gathering of information. Researchers might want to tell people about their own research and events and find out what other people in their field are doing and reading
Twitter can be used to ask a question or ask for advice from people with similar interests.
Many professional organisations, government bodies and funding councils use Twitter to keep people up to date with news and opportunities. Look out for 'Follow us on Twitter' links on their websites.
Twitter is now widely used at conferences, so delegates can post thoughts about the speakers, lectures or seminars. It's also a useful tool for people who were unable to go to a conference - they can follow what's being said on Twitter.
Informal peer review - social media tools such as Twitter provide a much faster method for people to comment on new publications, such as journal articles, than traditional scholarly methods. See this article in Nature for more on this.
Thing 3: Set up an account on Twitter, tweet about 11½ Things and start following our twitter account
If you don't already have a Twitter account we'd like you to set one up. If you do already have a Twitter account then you're welcome to use that account.
You are taken to a screen where you can choose people to follow based on your interests or friends. You can browse or search for people to follow. You do not have to choose anyone at this stage if you don't want to, and can just continue to the next step.
Once your account is set up you will receive a confirmation email from Twitter. You need to click on the link in the email to compete your registration.
Now you're ready to tweet! Convention in Twitter is to assign a 'tag' for a particular topic thread. This is a relevant word about your tweet with a hash symbol # in front of it. These are called 'hashtags'. We've decided on the following hashtag for 11½ Things: #11andahalfthings.
From your Twitter home page type a comment about 11½ Things in the 'What's happening' box and click on Tweet. Make sure you include the hashtag #11andahalfthings in your tweet. Remember you can only use a maximum of 140 characters!
To search for tweets on a particular topic you can enter a search term or hashtag into the search box at the top of the screen. Try carrying out a search for #11andahalfthings to see what other people have been tweeting.
WARNINGS:
It's very easy to type your search term into the 'What's happening' box, rather than the search box. Don't do this or you'll end up tweeting your search terms!
Some tweets may not appear in a search - Twitter explains that due to resource constraints not every tweet can be indexed in Twitter Search. Do not fret if you do not see your tweet when you do your search. If anyone is following you they should still see all your tweets.
Tips: Saving searches and reducing URL lengths You can save your search and come back to it at any time from the 'Searches' tab to see more tweets on that topic. If you want to start a topic thread then you can always make up your own hashtag, but it's a good idea to search for the hashtag first to make sure it isn't already in use!
Information you want to share on Twitter may include useful websites, but URLs can sometimes be long and take up a lot of characters. You can use a free website such as https://bitly.com/ or http://tinyurl.com/ to create an alternative short URL to link to any website.
How to follow someone on Twitter To follow someone on Twitter, click on the 'Who to follow' link from the black bar at the top of the page. You can then browse by interest, find friends from your email address book or just carry out a search for someone. Then click on 'Follow'.
Now start following us on Twitter. Our twitter username is 11andahalfthing.
Tip: Another Twitter convention If you want to address another person in your tweet, add an @ to the front of their username. This shows you are addressing them and it also means your tweet will appear in their 'Mentions' tab when they log in to Twitter so they can see who is addressing them or referring to them. For an example of using the @ and # in a tweet, you might type: #11andahalfthings @11andahalfthing Thanks for putting together this course!
Facebook
Probably the best known social networking site is Facebook. You can set up a personal profile and link to friends, but can also create or join groups or set up a facebook page, like a webpage, or become a fan of a page. Many companies or organisations choose to do this as a promotional tool and a way of keeping in touch with their customers or members. The 'groups' facility also provides a simple way to send a message to all members of the group at once.
Why use Facebook in a professional context? Many of the reasons mentioned above for Twitter also apply to Facebook. Here are some further reasons:
Monitor news and opportunities from relevant organisations and professional bodies – look out for ‘Follow us on Facebook’ links on organisations’ websites.
The flexibility of being able to include text, photos and videos and inviting interaction means that researchers and research groups might want to use facebook to publicise their work or invite comments or debate.
To get feedback on an issue from a large number of people. eg. See this article in the Lancet about how discussions on Facebook helped change health policy in Taiwan.
But where should you draw the line between personal and professional networking? For those of us concerned with making a distinction there are social networking sites set up purely for professional networking. Follow this link for a debate on using Facebook for professional reasons.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a social networking site set up specifically for professionals and has over 100 million members worldwide. It demonstrates that, especially in business, it's not what you know but who you know that counts. It enables you to create links with colleagues or professional contacts, to keep ahead of the job market through inside connections and ask for advice or contribute to debate with fellow industry experts. You can link directly with people, but can also make second or third degree connections through people they know. LinkedIn also has groups that you can join. Doctors.net.uk
There are other social networking sites that are set up for particular communities. Doctors.net.uk is the biggest medical networking resource in the UK, available to UK-registered doctors in primary and secondary care and has around 140,000 members. Although it doesn’t have all the interactive features of sites such as Facebook, it includes clinical and non-clinical forums which allow discussion and interaction between its members. It also offers a professional e-mail facility, medical news and continuing professional development tools.
Thing 4: Find an example of the use of a social networking site and share it on your blog
Try to find a profile, group or page on a social networking site that might be of use to a researcher, academic or clinician to support their research or practice, or created by them to assist with their work.
You could explore the sites we've already mentioned or explore some of the other sites mentioned in the Optional extras section below, or other sites you may know about. For most sites you should be able to access them and carry out limited searches without logging in but to get the full search capabilities you may need to set up a profile.
Alternatively you could try to find an instance where someone has written about how social networking has helped them in their research, academic work or clinical practice. For example, you could look in newspapers, journals or search the web for blog posts.
Post your example, or examples, on your blog. Add the tag 'Thing 4' to the labels box, and any other tags you might think are appropriate. You also might want to tweet about your examples or your thoughts on this week!
We look forward to reading your blog post.
The next set of 'Things' will be posted on this blog next Friday, 15 July 2011. We'll be looking at social bookmarking and social citation-sharing. If you're interested in social citation-sharing you might want to come to the Summer School session on 'Freely available bibliographic management and collaboration tools' on Friday 15 July from 10.00-12.00. We'll be exploring freely available social citation sharing tools such as Mendeley, Zotero and CiteULike. See the Summer School Moodle course for more information.
Optional extras
Oher social networking sites
Here are some examples of other social networking sites you might like to explore:
Conferences and events:
Lanyrd describes itself as a social conference directory. It utilises your social networking links set up through twitter to help you identify conferences that might be of interest. It alerts you to conferences that people you follow on twitter have found interesting. You can also add details of your own conferences or events and you can add slides, videos and audio files. Or you can search for conferences and then simply click on a link to share a conference on Twitter. You don’t need to register, just log in with your Twitter account and have a browse around.
Social networking sites for particular user groups:
MethodSpace - a site for researchers engaged in research methods
Graduate Junction - for postgraduate students in any subject doing a Masters or PhD, to connect with other postgrad students with similar academic interests
Sermo - largest online physician community in the United States
Tools for creating social networking sites:
Ning - A subscription-based site that allows you to create your own social network. Eg. The Master Clinician Network is a project designed to make peer reviewed examples of evidence-based clinical practice in speech-language pathology available for observation and critical discourse.
Ozmosis - US-based company providing software solutions for healthcare companies and organisations who wish to establish social networking, content management and communication channels.
Tip: Adding social networking links to your blog
You can add links on your blog or website to your Twitter, Facebook or other social networking profiles you may have. For example:
Welcome to Week 1 of 11½ Things. Over the next 6 weeks we’ll be looking at how researchers, academics, students or clinicians might want to make use of Web 2.0 or social media applications in relation to their work or studies. At the same time we'll be exploring how to use these tools ourselves.
Each week there will be a couple of 'Things' for you to do at a time convenient to you. Don't worry if you don't manage to do them within the week, you can always do them later or miss them out if you prefer. We’ll also provide extra information and links for exploring resources and tools further if you are interested and have any extra time to spare.
To kick off Week 1 we'll be focussing on blogs.
What are blogs?
A blog (or web-log) is essentially a webpage that displays entries in a chronological order, a bit like an online diary. They are easy to set up and there are lots of free providers. Blogs are usually interactive and allow readers to comment on the posts being made. They also feature RSS so that readers can set up feeds to alert them to new posts or comments on the blog (more about RSS later). Feeds can also be used to publish the blog content on other websites without having to update them separately. If you want to know more about blogs in general, check out the Wikipedia article on blogs.
Why blog?
People blog to share and disseminate information. On a personal level individuals may blog to share news with family and friends. On a professional level, reasons that researchers, academics, students and clinicians blog may include:
to disseminate their work and gain global impact quickly without the constraints of traditional scholarly communications
to publicise their publications or events they are involved in
to share ideas, comments, news or information and to build up professional networks
to exchange information or progress with a particular group of people, such as a research or project group
to reflect on their work or events attended to aid their professional development
to keep up to date by monitoring blogs created by other people or organisations
Organisations may use blogs to disseminate news or information about their services or products. Conferences or events may have accompanying blogs to give updates or publish abstracts or presentations.
Can you think of any other reasons why researchers, academics, students or clinicians might use blogs? Why not post a comment below?
Thing 1: Create your own blog and register it with us.
Throughout the 11½ Things programme we'll all be communicating and sharing our experiences through blog entries. You'll need to write on your own blog about each 'Thing' you complete.
Blogs are usually set up using a blogging platform, but then you can customise and personalise your blog to make it look like your own webstie. This blog is made available using Blogger, which is fairly simple to use so we shall give instructions for setting up your own blog on Blogger. Feel free to use another platform if you prefer, such as WordPress, Tumblr or TypePad. Alternatively if you already have a personal blog and prefer to use that for 11½ Things then please do. Once you have created your blog please email 11andahalfthings@gmail.com with the website address for your blog so we can create a link to it from the 11½ Things blog.
Did you know? UCL hosts its own blogs at http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/. For the purposes of this course we suggest you use a publicly available service as you are setting up a personal blog to express your own views and opinions, not as a public face of UCL.
How to set up a blog with Blogger
Go to Blogger and log in with your Google account. (If you don't have a Google account you will need to set one up - click on the 'Don't have a Google Account? Get Started' link). If you're not an author on any pre-existing blogs you will need to choose a Blogger display name and accept the Blogger terms and conditions. You may then need to click on Create a blog.
Choose a name and URL (website address) for your blog and click on Continue. NB. You might need to spend some time thinking of a URL as many are already in use. Try to think of one that is easy to spell, remember and say (for when you're telling people your blog address!)
Choose a template for your blog and click on Continue. You should now have a page confirming that your blog has been created. On the next page click on Start blogging. This takes you through to creating your first post but don't worry about that for now, we'll show you how to create a post as part of 'Thing 2' (below). At any time you can view your blog by clicking on View Blog.
Now please email 11andahalfthings@gmail.com with the URL of your blog so we can link to it from this blog.
Tips: Altering the design of your blog
Feel free to play about witht he design of your blog and customise it if you have time. You might want to look at some other blogs to get ideas about the layout and design and what to include.
Templates: Blogger is quite limited in the templates it provides but you can download alternative templates for free, eg. from BTemplates.com (these are downloaded as zip files from which you'll need to extract the .xml file). In the Design tab in Blogger, click on Edit HTML. Browse for your template saved on your computer and select Upload.
Gadgets: From the Design tab in Blogger you can choose to add or remove the various gadgets, or elements, that are displayed on your blog page. Click on Add a Gadget to browse and select new gadgets. You can always Edit or Remove these later. You can also move them around on your screen by dragging and dropping them.
Need more help? The following video is a useful introduction to creating a blog on blogger (depending on the set up of your PC you may not be able to hear the sound for this video, but you can still watch the demonstration):
Thing 2: Find an example of a blog and share it on your blog
We've already discussed some of the reasons that researchers, academics, students or clinicians might want to use blogs. Now we'd like you to find an example (or more than one if you're feeling keen!) of a blog that might be of interest to these types of people in biomedicine and health, or another subject area if you prefer. You might be able to identify a blog that is written by these types of people, or a blog written by an organisation or connected to an event that might be of interest to this user group. Where possible it might be most useful if you were able to find UK examples. Then we'd like you to make your first post on your blog telling the rest of the group about the example(s) you have identified. How much you write about it is totally up to you.
If you are using Blogger you can follow these instructions to create your first blog post:
Click on the Posting tab and then New Post. (Or if you are continuing on from the instructions in 'Thing 1', click on the big orange Start blogging arrow).
Enter a title for your post and start typing! You can format the text using the toolbar at the top of the box.
Tell us a bit about a useful blog and don't forget to include a link to the blog. To make text link to a website, highlight the text, click on Link on the toolbar and paste in the URL.
You can add tags to your blog post by entering words separated by commas in the Labels box below the main box. These can help people find entries in your blog later, just like we might add subject headings to a catalogue record when cataloguing a book. We suggest you add the tag Thing 2, and any other tags of your choice.
Click on Preview to see your post before you publish it. When ready you can click on Publish Post.
Tip: Insert images or videos using the links on the toolbar to make your blog more interesting visually, but make sure you abide by copyright restrictions! We'll be looking in more detail at using audiovisual media in week 6.
We look forward to reading your blog post. The next set of 'Things' will be posted on this blog next Friday, 8 July 2011.
Optional extras
Every week we'll have some optional extras which will take you beyond the basics of the topic being covered, which you can investigate if you are interested and have the time.
Following other people's blogs
We already mentioned that blogs make use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) which enables you to set up feeds to blogs or other websites so that you can monitor their content without having to visit them individually. To find RSS feeds on a page, look for an orange symbol, such as those illustrated on the right, or a hyperlink indicating a feed is available.
There are various ways of keeping track of feeds:
Web browsers: Some Web browsers, including Internet Explorer 7 and above (not available via UCL WTS) and Firefox, have built in RSS readers and work in a similar way to saving web pages in your favorites or bookmarks. The disadvantage of using your Web browser to keep track of RSS feeds is that you will only be able to see them from the computer on which you saved them.
Through your email: Some email programmes, such as Outlook, have built in RSS readers so you can look at your RSS feeds much as you would look in a folder in your email.
Web-based RSS readers: These are freely available websites that allow you to log in and manage your feeds. Popular examples include Google Reader and Bloglines.
Personalised web portals / start pages: You can set up your own personalised home page where you can keep track of your feeds, monitor your email and add gadgets to access information from all sorts of Web sources, such as news headlines, weather forecasts, stock market data, bookmarks to favourite websites, etc. Examples include iGoogle, MyYahoo!, NetVibes and PageFlakes.
Activity: Have a go at setting up your own personalised web page using iGoogle or another provider of your choice and add some gadgets to it.
Then add an RSS feed to your personalised web page linking to the 11½ Things blog. To do this:
Under the SUBSCRIBE TO heading on the right hand side click on Posts and select the personalised web page service you have been using. If using iGoogle, for example, click on Add to Google Homepage.
You will be taken to your homepage and you should now see a link to 11½ Things. Every time we post a new entry on the 11½ Things blog you can now read it through your personalised home page.
