JISC is funded by the UK HE and FE funding bodies to provide world-class leadership in the innovative use of ICT to support education and research.
Here are some useful videos provided by JISC about Web 2.0 and social media:
I’ve had Evernote on the back burner for a while now, wanting to get round to investigating its potential. Evernote presents itself as an ‘external brain’, remembering things so you don’t have to (using the elephants in the clouds). It’s client driven, so there’s a download involved, but there are a host of downloads for different operating systems and mobile devices. The client then synchronizes with your Evernote account (free or monthly subscription depending on how much you want to use it).
The current promo video is:
And I found this original video useful to explain Evernote’s uses.
I have to admit that I’m not a fan of sync’ing. I prefer to use online services that access the content directly on the server without having to use a dedicated client, with one or two exceptions. Consequently, I’m not sure I’ll be using Evernote as much as I anticipated. However, that might not reflect other people’s working practises, so I thought it useful to present some of what I would find Evernote useful for.
I think the main use for me is the way Evernote can allow you to search text in images. This has particular use for education if you take a photo or a screen shot of some relevant text, or hand written notes, possibly from a whiteboard, then suddenly you have a searchable object.
I gave it a try with possibly a difficult test of this image and did a search for “franc” (part of fancisco). The result was pretty good but not perfect.
Evernote also allows you to collaborate by sharing your ‘notebooks’
Further videos about Evernote and how to use it are available on their YouTube channel or the video page of their website.
Google just yesterday announced their new facility, Sidewiki. It’s a plugin for Firefox and IE at the moment, Chrome is to follow (where it is anticipated to be in by default).
I’ve been using similar functions provided by Diigo (the bookmarking and annotation service) for some time now. Just part of what you can do with Diigo is comment on a whole page using a sidebar facility. And this is pretty much what Sidewiki does.
“Why does this change anything?”, you might ask. Well, even though Diigo is a fantastic service (which I’ve written about here and here, and talked about here), it just hasn’t got the penetration required (yet) to achieve its full potential. Whereas Google has the pulling power.
“So why is being able to leave or read other people’s comment significant?” Well, this makes every page on the web is collaborative. Every page has the potential for dialogue and discussions to take place, informing and adding to the original content; re-enforcing the premise or refuting it.
Every corporate page now had the potential to have consumer comments presented alongside. Every PR disaster can instantly be commented on, on your own website, by thousand or tens of thousands of disgruntled customers. And remember, customers trust each other and their opinions more than they trust the corporate stance; think of Customer Reviews on Amazon.
The renowned analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, has said that a Social Strategy needs to be developed, now. He highlights three point in his web strategy blog:
But consider the potential for education. You can now have asynchronous discussions on topics in-situ with renowned experts in the area, from universities and industry, researchers, students, school children, or anyone who is interested.
Or is it a bad thing?
The Web just got a little bit more interesting.
