In my earlier post on MiniSoOnCon I mentioned that journalism students from Ryerson and UWO were covering the event as part of a project on Maker Culture. You can now see the first part of the series on rabble.ca and The Tyee.
Archive for: January, 2010
Social media rules of engagement
I just discovered an excellent post by Alisa Leonard-Hansen (Vice Chair, Communications at the DataPortability Project) on the importance of governance models in the creation of social media strategies.
The considerations for a social media governance model are numerous: brand identity/voice/tone, internal resources, staffing and stakeholders, work-flow adjustments, escalation policies, appropriate topics of conversation and language, identity/social equity “ownership” (who does brand social equity belong to? The employee Tweeting on behalf of a brand or the brand?), legal issues and rammifciations, industry regulations, content posting policies….well you get the point. While this may seem a bit of an arduous task, creating these governance models lay a crucial foundation, and are vital to any social media–ahem, digital– strategy and long term success (and they’re actually fun to create too, believe it or not).
Explaining to someone unfamiliar with social media how to deal with and distinguish between trolls and legitimate complaints and appropriate levels of response is difficult, as the internet is a realm with a sociology of its own distinct from our everyday experience. Alisa’s example of the Rules of Engagement visual for the US Air Force provides any librarian working on social media strategy a clear and succinct means to do this.
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Google Wave in education and libraries
Since the launch of Google Wave, there seems to be confusion about how best to use it. However, The Chronicle of Higher Education looks at attempts by colleges to engage with the technology in light of earlier predictions that it could replace course management software.
Ray Schroeder gave it a try last semester at the University of Illinois at Springfield, one of the first colleges to use Wave for online teaching since the preview version came out in September. For about two weeks in December, he joined his “Internet in American Life” course with a class on energy studies at the Institute of Technology at Sligo, in Ireland. They created a “wave” to discuss the impact of the Internet on energy sustainability.
But what if you merged a biology class and a philosophy class? You could have them evaluate a bioethics case study, suggests Mr. Schroeder, director of the university’s Center for Online Learning, Research, and Service. Or what about a class on Asian history? You could use Wave’s translation tool and hook up with a group of Chinese students.
What about libraries? Well, over at the UKOLN’s Cultural Heritage blog there is an analysis of how Google Wave has been received by librarians in the United Kingdom, where it seems that, like the rest of us, they intend to “wait and see”.
Overall, whilst interest in Wave was high, there was a degree of scepticism regarding how useful it is to librarians. Tellingly, some respondents felt that there are not enough extensions for Wave to make it useful to librarians yet and that nobody has actually found a valuable practical use for Wave in libraries at this point. One respondent went as far as to state that Wave has yet to be used for anything beyond time wasting. On the whole, respondents seemed happy to let Wave develop and let other people find uses for it before they approach it with any seriousness.
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