[welcome to scoopville: social media basics]

Social media: describe, rate, comment and connect: key ideas of social media. New opportunities to create and care

Watch the video:

[how to reference web content]

The following useful post explains how to find the *original* date something was posted to a web site. Very useful for those referencing online content:

"There are basically three different dates associated with any "public" web page that’s available on the Internet:

1. The publication date - this is the date when a web page or a website is first uploaded on to a public web server so that human beings and search spiders can find and read that page.

2. The discovery date - this is the date when search engine spiders first discover a web page on the Internet. Given the fact that Google has become so good at crawling fresh content, the date of first-crawl can be the same as the actual publication date (#1).

3. The cache date - this is the date when a web page was last crawled by the search bot. While webmasters can use XML sitemaps to hint search engines that a page on the site has changed, search bots are free to ignore that advice and therefore the cache date may or may not be the same as the last modified date.

To give you an example, the publication date of this article is February 25, 2008 (it’s mentioned on the web-page), the discovery date (when Google first crawled that page) is also Feb 25, 2008 but the cache date, or the day when Googlebot last crawled that page, is April 20, 3009.

Know The Publishing Date of Web Pages

Now in the above case, the author has himself indicated the publishing date of the web page but in situations where the date is not specified (or you think the mentioned date in incorrect), here’s a simple hack to help you know when a web page or web domain was last published on the Internet.

Step 1. Go to google.com and copy-paste the full URL of the web page in the search box along with the inurl: operator (e.g. inurl:www.example.com). Hit enter.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites

Step 2. Now go to browser address bar (Ctrl+L in Firefox or Alt+D in Internet Explorer) and copy-paste "&as_qdr=y15" at the end of the Google search URL. Hint enter again.

google.com/search?q=inurl:http://www.labnol.org/websites&as_qdr=y15

Step 3. Google will load the results again and this time, you’ll see the actual publication date of the web page next to the title in Google search results as in this screenshot.

Video Screencast: Know when a web page was published

Using the same trick, Google tells us that the MySpace.com domain appeared in Google around 31 March 2002, Orkut on 12 Jan 2004 while Barack Obama created his Twitter account on 05 March 2007. The first publication date for Yahoo.com, Whitehouse.gov, CNN.com, Microsoft and other very old domains is mentioned as 31 Jan 2001 which is incorrect but that probably is a bug because Google’s crawler database does include pages prior to that date like this one.

These site publication dates may not be 100% accurate in all cases but they should be very close especially for new web pages and domains.

See some more tools to know everything about a website."

This article is from the Digital Inspiration site run by Amit Agarwal.

[web 2.0 tools and education]

I've been reading the JISC report on Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education and on page 8 the authors have this useful list of ideas on how to use certain web 2.0 tools to facilitate learning. None of them are new to me but still good ideas. I'd be interested to hear what innovative uses other educators are coming up with.

Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lectures, or, more commonly, to record lectures and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning. Podcasts can be used to make lectures redundant while still supplying (possibly didactic) presentations of learning material by lecturers.
· Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of experimental procedures in advance of lab sessions
· Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.
· Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system.
· The ability to comment on and critique each others work; including by people on other courses or at other institutions.
· Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment. It could be used for the example above.
· For Flickr, FlickrCC18 is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
· Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video allows for longer higher quality videos than YouTube, and contains a specific genre of educational video

"Education in every country and in every epoch has always been social in nature. Indeed, by its very essence it could hardly exist as anti-social in anyway. Both in the seminary and in the old high school, in the military schools and in the schools for the daughters of the nobility [...] it was never the teacher or the tutor who did the teaching, but the particular social environment in the school which was created for each individual instance" ~~Vygotsky

[how to write fiction]

This morning's Guardian has arrived. After briefly skimming the front page and a lengthy read of the Money section (100 questions about the current *financial* climate answered!) I happily found Kate Pullinger's tutorial on "How to Write Fiction." Working with Sue Thomas, Kate runs DMU's Online Masters in Creative Writing and New Media (and is author of Inanimate Alice with Chris Joseph) and thus is the perfect person to write this user-friendly guide. I'm definitely going to memorise these tips including the suggestion to "turn off your word count."

This guide book doesn't tell you where to buy your ideas: "Asda for chick-lite, perhaps, Waitrose for literary fiction," but it certainly includes loads of opportunities for laughter (not something I would expect from any guide). Kate tells us that writing is about "graft" rather than just a great ideas and that the act of writing is the important thing:

"But really, the best way to start writing is to start writing. Get the words down onto the page. For many writers the most productive technique is to push on, regardless of what crap they are spewing. Bad writing can be imprved upon, can be polished and cut and shaped and revices. A blank page is just that, and the only thing it is good for is driving you crazy."

Besides the instructions concerning genre, character, setting etc and the wide reference to other writers, there is a checklist:

1. Is the beginning too slow?
2. Have I "killed my darlings"?
3. Have I checked my grammar and punctuation?
4. Have I laid out my dialogue properly?
5. After my compelling beginning, amd I keeping my reader interested?
6. Is it finished?

If you don't have the Guardian hardcopy, each of the eight steps included in the guide are available as separate articles on the Guardian site.

[strategies for stronger readers]

According to Mary Rogers Rose, strong readers demonstrate the following strategies:

"Before reading, effective readers:

• Set clear goals for reading.


• Actively pursue meaning and activate prior knowledge.
  
• Preview the text.
  
• Make predictions.
  
• Generate questions to be answered.
  

  During reading, effective readers:
  
  

• Pay close attention to text structure.
  
• Read texts selectively based on purpose(s) for reading.
  
• Construct and revise meaning.
  
• Determine whether the text and information are meeting goals.
  
• Integrate prior knowledge with information and ideas from text(s).
  
• Think about and question the text’s and author’s information and ideas.
  
• Monitor and revise understanding of the text.
  
• Determine the meaning of unfamiliar words and concepts using a variety of strategies.
  
• Reconcile inconsistencies or gaps in information and ideas as necessary.
  

  
  

  After reading effective readers:
  
  

• Evaluate text quality and value.
  
• Respond to text mainly through questioning, additional reading, or discussion.
  
• Reflect upon texts during reading, during pauses in reading, and after reading.
  
• Consider comprehension and learning to be satisfying and productive experiences."

I wonder how we can work these strategies into a reading of a new media fiction such as Inanimate Alice?

[blogging a conference - some tips]

I came across this excellent guide by Bruno Giussani and Ethan Zuckerman through Sue Thomas's google reader shared feedz.

In no particular order:

Speakers
"It’s relatively easy to blog good and great speakers: They follow a narrative path through their talks and speak at a pace the audience can understand.
It’s harder to blog inexperienced speakers(because they may be too technical,
confusing, fast, etc.) and multi-speaker panels (because the discussion can take many different unstructured turns). But you don’t need to transcribe the whole talk, you need to capture the gist of it. A 20-minutes talk can often be summarized in a
20-lines post.

Audience
You’re not blogging for the speaker, you’re blogging for yourself and for the people who may read your blog. So if a talk is too hard, too bad, too uninteresting to blog, don’t be afraid to give up on it. It’s the speaker’s fault if (s)he can’t make the material interesting or intelligible. (This should never, however, be an excuse for laziness.)

Timing
Ideally, you should liveblog, which means that you write the post, and add the links, as the speaker is talking, and publish the post not later than 10 minutes after the speech or panel is over. Not everybody can do this; it takes a certain habit. Think of it this way: If you can publish right away, you will be able to network with the other conference participants during the breaks, rather
than sitting at your laptop rewriting your notes."