Social Computing Graduate Program

Adding to my post of yesterday where I quoted Karl Fisch's statement, "The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in 2004."

Today, I found this item from the University of Michigan's School of Information:

SI adds six new specializations to master's program

(Mar 2007) The University of Michigan School of Information is responding to fast-paced changes in the information professions by offering students six new specializations, including social computing, incentive-centered design, and community informatics.

They say "Social Computing specialists will be highly qualified to step into positions such as these: Online community manager; Product manager; Social network analyst; Community organizer; Management consultant; User experience analyst; e-Marketing associate; Web analyst". How many of these jobs existed in 2004?

The Future is Coming Fast!

This 6 minute video - Shift Happens - based on a presentation by Karl Fisch is thought provoking and scary! In it he talks about globalization in the information age. Well worth the time to watch.

Some quotes:

The top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn't exist in 2004.

We are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist using technologies that haven't yet been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet.

I ate Chinese today and my fortune cookie said "The wise thing to do is to prepare for the unexpected." This was very apropos because during lunch, we were discussing this video and the only way I see to prepare for the unexpected changes that will come from what Karl talks about is to increase your basic knowledge gathering and learning skills. Learn how to stay up-to-date! Learn to use the tools as they come available - one at a time - rather than trying to learn everything after everyone else is already there.

SlideShare

Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ offers you a way to post your presentations (PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenOffice) - up to 30MB - and share them with the world. Of course, I don't care about sharing with the world, but there are times I want to share my presentations with more than a couple others and this is a great repository for you to use to do just that. Think of it as free web space for hosting your presentations.

It is also a cool place to find presentations on topics you are interested in teaching or learning - (i.e. Teaching Excel or Animals and Disaster). Once you find a presentation in your area, you've also found someone who knows about the topic you are interested. You can see other presentations from that same individual.

PBwiki has gone AD FREE

PBwiki recently made all of their wikis ad free. They are making their money by selling extra features like customizing the design or more file space. The 10MB that comes with the free account is plenty for thousands of pages - you'd want the additional space if you were sharing files or had lots of images.

Their tag line is, “Make a PBwiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich” and it's true! It's hard to imagine that it could be any easier.

This fits perfectly with all kinds of groups of people working together. There are just so many times a wiki would be the perfect tool for all types of projects. I recently started one for our boy scout troop to be able to post the minutes of all our leader meetings and to develop the agendas for our camping trips - http://troop701.pbwiki.com

RSS for beginners

Lee LeFever posted a video that does an EXCELLENT job of explaining RSS in Plain English

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

What not to do with PowerPoint

Start your week with some humor.
Comedian Don McMillan hits the highlights of what not to do with PowerPoint in the video:
Life After Death by PowerPoint

Legal Guide for Bloggers

The Legal Guide for Bloggers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation answers several legal questions that bloggers need to be aware of. Here are just a few of the questions they answer that I found interesting. There are lots more on their site.

• I found something interesting on someone else's blog. May I quote it?
• What is fair use?
• May I freely copy from federal government documents?
• Am I free to copy facts and ideas?
• How does a Creative Commons license help?
• I'd like to let other people copy from my blog. Can I license it?
• If a reader comments on my blog, does she license the rights to me?
• Can I "deep link" to someone else's website or blog post?
• When can I borrow someone's images for my blog post?
• Can I use a trademark in my blog's name or in the title of a blog post?
• What is "Libel Per Se"?
• Can I be sued for publishing somebody else's private facts?
• What is offensive to a reasonable person?

It's a site worth looking at if you blog. The good news is that as a blogger, you are allowed an awful lot of latitude - mostly under the freedom of speech laws.

Guerrilla Gardening

Talk about 'random acts of kindness'. These guys are doing something really nice for communities.

http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

Maybe this is something that might catch on with the Master Gardeners program. Guerrilla MGs???

Blog Readership survey

Vizu and AdAge conducted a "Blog Readership" survey and it had some interesting results.
The report leaves out some important information, such as who was surveyed and how many.

I didn't see any major surprises in their conclusions (some of which I quoted below).

• Community is a primary driver of readership within blogosphere
- search engines are secondary to links and recommendations as a way to find blogs
• Quality of writing is a very important driver of how people perceive blogs
- Personal opinion oriented content is the defining characteristic of blogs
• Personal interest and entertainment drive more readership than business or education

See the complete results.

BackPackIt

http://www.backpackit.com/

Here's another useful tool for collaborating! Amazingly simple to use.

Keep track of a to-do list, notes, writeboards, and links. For a fee, you can share a calendar, upload files and images and have more pages.

I think this could be a pretty simple project management tool.

But, I ask myself "What can you do here that you can't in a wiki?" And I answer myself, "mmm... Maybe it has a better interface for doing what it does - easier for a novice - maybe." Not really sure. I think I'll stick with my wikis for collaborating. I'm sure it's the right tool for something and someone. Certainly worth looking at and creating an account - just to play with for a few minutes.