Skip to main content

Blogging for learning professionals

Today Ajay and me completed a workshop on New Media for students at SCIT. I absolutely love talking about the potential of New Media, specifically blogging, and podcasting. Now it's not that blogging and podcasting are going to change the world, but the underlying concept of participatory media WILL. Blogging is a mechanism to achieve the vision of participation. Maybe over time it will evolve, maybe it will be replaced with something else, but the vision of grassroots participation is so powerful, that it cannot and should not be ignored.


Here are the slides from the presentation, followed by links to some blogs and websites we spoke about. 

 



UPDATE: If you live in Pune or can travel there, be sure to come to BlogCampPune. It is going to be the first BlogCamp in Pune, and I'm sure it will be a great event. Many thanks to Tarun for taking the initiative to organize it.







Links:

  • Stephen Downes' website on learning... this is a must read for those who believe that the current teaching scenario needs a lot of improvement, and would like to strive for a system of learning which will enable each person to rise to his or her fullest potential.
  • Joel Spolsky's blog. He writes about many issues related to computing, software development, and sometimes whatever he feels like. His blogs are almost always very insightful and well written.
  • Steve Pavlina writes an excellent blog on personal development for smart people.
  • Guy Kawasaki would like to change the world 25,000 people at a time through his blog. He writes about many things, and always in a very engaging and insightful manner.
  • Jon Udel was one of the very early bloggers.
  • Kathy Sierra writes an awesome blog on improving the user experience of your product. It inspires it's readers to excel.
  • The Long Tail is a blog that evolved into a book (or maybe a book that started of as a blog).
  • Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO also blogs.
  • Some blog feed readers: Google reader, and Bloglines.
  • Ranjan Jha, my student from 2 years back at SCIT. I enjoy reading his blog a lot.
  • Blog feeds: RSS, and Atom.
  • All about Blog linkbacks.
  • Free blogging services: Wordpress, and Blogger.
  • ITVidya.com, a portal for the IT knowledge, networking, and opportunities.
  • Some paid blogging services: Typepad, Radio Userland, and Square Space.
  • Free blogging software: Movable Type, WordPress, and Roller Weblogger.
  • Search blog content on Google blog search and technorati.
  • Some blogging best practices and ethics from Rebacca Blood.
  • A blog/podcast on educational technology and new media in learning.
  • A teacher's blog. Very well written, and insightful. He often writes on his experiences of using blogging in the classroom.
  • If you are already suffering from information overloaded, you might want to go here.


Notes: This text was originally posted on my earlier blog at http://www.adaptivelearningonline.net
Here are the comments from the original post

-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Tarun Chandel
URL: www.tarunchandel.blogspot.com
DATE: 01/27/2007 02:26:19 PM
Hi Parag Sir

A very good presentation, it's really important to realize that something very interesting is changing the people learn and share. It's great that SCIT had such a good workshop, I remember that you were the one who introduced me and Ranjan to blogs and to podcasts. For me these two has been major source of learning in past one year.

It was really good move from you to bring Ajay from IT Vidya to SCIT, as it always inspiring to listen from the people who have actually done something good in the particular field. I am sure that we will see a lot more SCITians in the blogosphere.

Ajay is a very good speaker, I met him at BarcampPune2, I liked the way he presented in a simple manner a very important thought, "How blogging can be helpful?" That got me thinking and I was planning to conduct a <a href="http://barcamp.org/BlogCampPune">BlogCamp</a> in Pune. If the idea interests you do get back to me so that we can take this idea further. I will also be discussing this idea with Ajay and let's see how he responds.

COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Parag
DATE: 01/29/2007 07:10:27 AM
Hey Tarun,

I am glad I was able to inspire you and Ranjan to start blogging. I too have benefited in many ways since I started blogging.

I will be glad to help out in organizing BlogCampPune.

--
Regards
Parag

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Popular posts from this blog

Five Reasons Why Your Product Needs an Awesome User Guide

Photo Credit: Peter Merholz ( Creative Commons 2.0 SA License ) A user guide is essentially a book-length document containing instructions for installing, using or troubleshooting a hardware or software product. A user guide can be very brief - for example, only 10 or 20 pages or it can be a full-length book of 200 pages or more. -- prismnet.com As engineers, we give a lot of importance to product design, architecture, code quality, and UX. However, when it comes to the user manual, we often only manage to pay lip service. This is not good. A usable manual is as important as usable software because it is the first line of help for the user and the first line of customer service for the organization. Any organization that prides itself on great customer service must have an awesome user manual for the product. In the spirit of listicles - here are at least five reasons why you should have an awesome user manual! Enhance User Satisfaction In my fourteen years as a

Inheritance vs. composition depending on how much is same and how much differs

I am reading the excellent Django book right now. In the 4th chapter on Django templates , there is an example of includes and inheritance in Django templates. Without going into details about Django templates, the include is very similar to composition where we can include the text of another template for evaluation. Inheritance in Django templates works in a way similar to object inheritance. Django templates can specify certain blocks which can be redefined in subtemplates. The subtemplates use the rest of the parent template as is. Now we have all learned that inheritance is used when we have a is-a relationship between classes, and composition is used when we have a contains-a relationship. This is absolutely right, but while reading about Django templates, I just realized another pattern in these relationships. This is really simple and perhaps many of you may have already have had this insight... We use inheritance when we want to allow reuse of the bulk of one object in other

Planning a User Guide - Part 3/5 - Co-ordinate the Team

Photo by  Helloquence  on  Unsplash This is the third post in a series of five posts on how to plan a user guide. In the first post , I wrote about how to conduct an audience analysis and the second post discussed how to define the overall scope of the manual. Once the overall scope of the user guide is defined, the next step is to coordinate the team that will work on creating the manual. A typical team will consist of the following roles. Many of these roles will be fulfilled by freelancers since they are one-off or intermittent work engagements. At the end of the article, I have provided a list of websites where you can find good freelancers. Creative Artist You'll need to work with a creative artist to design the cover page and any other images for the user guide. Most small to mid-sized companies don't have a dedicated creative artist on their rolls. But that's not a problem. There are several freelancing websites where you can work with great creative ar