New Blog Focused on Open Education, Electronic Textbooks, and Social Media

I have been very quiet on this blog recently, but it doesn't mean I haven't been busy...

I have created a new blog centered on open education, electronic textbooks, and the use of social media in education, so you're encouraged to follow it if those topics are of interest to you. I'm also gathering faculty stories around these topics to showcase on the blog, so if you have juicy examples, please let me know!

The blog is located at http://sites.udel.edu/open/

Hope to see your avatar in the comment section ;-)

Sharing the Obvious

This week, I had a conversation with a colleague about sharing ideas. I tried my best to explain that blogging and tweeting was about giving a new spin to information, to share with followers stuff that they might find interesting, to open up our minds to the world.

We had a conversation that went something like this (this is a very short extract from a longer discussion, the way I somewhat recall it):

Colleague: I helped someone today with extracting an email list from a message he got. I explained how to copy and paste the email addresses in Word and clean up the list by using the "Find and Replace" feature. I didn't share this with anyone, people in IT all know this stuff.

Me: Yes, it's obvious to you, of course. But that process and knowledge just ended here with you now.

Colleague: Hmmm... But the process is so easy. What people who do troubleshooting need to know is not the answer, it's getting the user to really define the problem.

Me: You have obviously internalized a lot of processes and information to troubleshoot users. What you're describing is implicit knowledge, stuff that can't really be taught to someone, values, beliefs, instincts. Since it's not always easy to share those instincts, maybe a collection of those stories could help other understand that process better?

That discussion made me realize that my use of social media and my blog is mostly about sharing what's obvious. Even if it's clear and obvious to me now, it doesn't mean it will later. My blog posts, evernotes, tweets, wall posts, youtubes, and flickrs, are just traces of where I've been, of what I've read, learned, and internalized at one point in time.

I recently read a book called Made To Stick. They refer to this issue for experts to explain something to novices as "The Curse Of Knowledge", the difficulty that comes from remembering what it meant not to know in order to speak the same language as the learner.

So, please bear with me as I'll continue to share stuff that seems trivial to me. I'll do my best to try to explain it in a way that makes sense to people who don't know.

Well, duh...

Faculty Practice: Use of Blogs in Anu Sivaraman's Marketing Classes

I recorded a short interview with Anu Sivaraman, Professor, Business Administration, about her use of blogs in her IT in Marketing classes. We tried to keep the video as short as possible and were able to keep it down to 5 minutes.



I think this practice is really smart, since marketing graduates tend to get entry-level jobs that requires them to maintain or publish to blogs, and be involved in business social media from the get-go.

I am going to use this video during my new training session on social media and web 2.0 in higher education that's coming up next week. Although it is targeted at UD faculty, I'll Ustream it as well. Check my Twitter account for updates (@mathplourde)!