Presentation – Weaving Your Social Bookmarking Knowledge Network

http://solr.bccampus.ca/wiki/index.php/Weaving_Your_Social_Bookmarking_Knowledge_Network

As part of my perennial quest to foment change, I’m trying to initiate a series of grassroots “brown bag lunch online presentations” within BCcampus. We are a distributed organization of 20+ people spread across over a half-dozen locations, so building community and sharing our practices and knowledge informally can be very hard. This is one small effort on my part to improve this.

To kick it off I delivered the above presentation, on using social bookmarking to help build your knowledge network, to about a dozen of my fellow staff today. We used Elluminate to run the session, and aside from the normal hiccups with sound cards and missing mics, it seemed to run pretty well and I’m hoping was well received. The real proof will be if anyone else starts to use this technqiue to start sharing their attention and knowledge, and also whether it inspires anyone else to stand up and run a session of their own. I hope it does. I built the original presentation within our Confluence wiki (partly to walk the talk with that tool) but posted it here in a mediawiki instance in the hopes that it might be of more general interest. It’s formatted to work ok with the Greasemonkey Mediaiwiki Presentation script as well. – SWL

BC ELN Using Blogs to Brainstorm their Strategic Planning process

http://bceln.blogspot.com/2006/01/
about-electronic-brainstorm-wild-ideas_31.html

Kudos to the BC Electronic Library Network for trying the interesting experiment of using Blogger as a mechanism to facilitate collectively brainstorming by their members. As I understand the model, staff from the participating partner libraries are invited to either comment on posts, or log into Blogger using accounts that ELN has set up for them that can make new posts on the main brainstorming blog, all of which will be fed into the larger Strategic Planning process. Nice model for a consortia to use as it keeps it open and public but hopefully still provides some autonomy and flow. Will be interesting to see how it works, and at the very least may be a step in exposing some additional librarians to the technology (not that most of them need this, we are lucky to have an amazingly sophisticated bunch in our province.) – SWL

OpalTree’s CADRiA

http://www.opaltree.com/

Early this week, BCcampus hosted an event to take a closer look at some of the open source course/learning management systems that are currently available and commence (or really continue) a province-wide dialog on the viability of implementing one and the issues surrounding such a project.

In the afternoon we were given a demo of OpalTree’s CADRiA system, out of Australia (what are they putting in the water down there!?! These folks seem to be simply bursting with innovation in the learning objects/elearning field!). In my mind the demo was actually a bit out of place in that particular day’s focus – when I think Course/LearningMS, I think more of delivery and tracking capabilities (of which CADRiA appears to lack many basic ones) instead of authoring, aggregation and searching capabilities (more à la LOR/LCMS, of which CADRiA had some simply mind bending qualities).

So if what you’re currently seeking is an LMS, I wouldn’t necessarily send you in this direction. But if you are involved with more of a learning content management/object repository-type issue, you’d do well to wade through their site, maybe look at their ‘demonstration’ flash movies, and see what they are doing. Read on for more…
Continue reading “OpalTree’s CADRiA”

Web-based Outliner

http://demo.weboutliner.com/weboutliner/

This was just too cool not to post on – a web-based outliner that produces OPML files.

I have been a long-time fan of outlining software ever since I was first introduced to MORE on the Mac, way back in the day. It was actually one of the things that made me adopt Radio as a blogging tool at first (Dave Winer was also involved heavily with MORE, and Radio has a built-in outliner). As regular readers will know I finally ditched Radio as a blogging tool, but now miss having the outlining capabilities. Well here you go. Hooray! – SWL

The Best-Selling Dissertations of 2002

One likely can’t make too much out of this, but I thought it interesting that 3 of the top 10 ‘best selling’ dissertations (as reported by Proquest) related to knowledge management. If you set your filter a little broader, you might even say that about half of these related to learning within organizations. – SWL

-via [ResourceShelf]