Low blogging, lots of unfinished work, new projects
Another month is gone with very low blogging here. Actually, my whole last month’s life revolved around blogs: I worked on my blog course, I met Romanian bloggers, I wrote papers on blogging, I lead a workshop on blogging… And I blogged a lot in Gabrielia, my blog in Romanian language, and in my other blogs.
I tried to give a new impulse to my blogging students, challenging them to talk about a few specific topics, such as:
- do I need to use all the available blog features? What is the 20% of absolutely necessary and most used features?
- what do I do to promote my blog and what are the results?
- do my readers perceive me correctly?
- could I use my blog as a professional portfolio when looking for a new job?
- what are the advantages and disadvantages of an online course, without any face-to-face interaction?
There wasn’t much feedback. It looks like you can learn the technique, but if you miss the spirit…
There were some notable exceptions, but more about this in a later post…
I sent a paper to the Business Informatics conference organised every two years by my Alma Mater in Bucharest on the use of weblogs in education, titled “Collaborative Learning using Weblogs”. I had another topic in mind for it, but the time was very short and I thought I could base my paper on a blog post made few weeks before on blogs in education(sorry, only in Romanian, but some of the links are relevant!). The post was triggered by a information request made by a Romanian journalist from Jurnalul National while I was still in Luxembourg.
Well, bad assumption – it proved to be really difficult to turn a blog post into one section of a scientific paper. The rules of these two are completely different:
- hyperlinks in the blog post versus explanations in the paper (with the corresponding references);
- personal feelings and opinions versus objective findings;
- a friendly tone vs an impersonal one;
- free form versus an imposed structure.
I made it till the end. But I will never again assume that it will be easier to write a paper on a specific topic because I blogged on it before!
And of course, I sent an abstract to the ECKM ’05 which will take place in Limerick, Ireland, titled “At the Crossroads of Knowledge Management with Social Software”.
I intend to reuse parts of an internal report written for CRPHT on Social Software, and to have a closer look at the manner in which Social Software supports KM, with emphasis on particular KM activities at the individual, group and societal level. I’m planning to illustrate my statements with examples from various weblogs, wikis, social networking and folksonomy sites.
I’m not only “emotionally involved” with ECKM (and I have plenty of reasons to be so: participated in 3 of the 5 editions, know a lot of the “usual suspects”, member of the organising committee, Larry Prusak as keynote speaker), but I also have a particular reason to be there this year: if everything goes well, I’ll already be in Limerick in September, working on a new and exciting project.
I’m already in contact with my new team mates, as we are considering a possible participation in a workshop on Distributed Software Development in Paris, colocated with the IEEE International RE Conference 2005.
The deadline of the “User-Centered Evaluation and Online Communities” call for book chapters is at the end of the week, and I still don’t know if I will make it or not. I have a few good ideas, but there’s still a lot of work needed.
How was that nice quote? I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Thanks, Google;-)
April 23 2005 10:23 pm | Uncategorized