Organisational learning and Blogs: Reflections

Some Salamanca Photos

Gavin Baxter — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:15:06 +0000

Click to view slideshow. Here are some of my photos of the historical city of Salamanca taken when I was there recently in October of this year. Some of the photos have come out quite well though am not too sure why they’ve come out sideways…will to investiagte as well as purchase my own digital camera I think…

Some Photos from my Korinthos EU Partner Meeting Trip

Gavin Baxter — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 21:16:44 +0000

Here are some photos of a recent trip where I travelled to Korinthos just outside Athens in June. It was for an EU Project partners meeting for our Web2.0 ERC project. Korinthos is a really nice place. It was very warm there that time of year – one day reached a maximum temperature of 38 degrees! Fortunately we had time to travel to the site of ancient Korinthos which was of great interest to me as my first degree is in Classical Civilisation.

Click to view slideshow.

ICEUTE 2011 Conference Salamanca, Spain

Gavin Baxter — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:59:29 +0000

I have recently returned from the International Conference on EUropean Transnational Education (20th – 21st October) which was held in the beautiful city of Salamanca in Spain. The conference was actually held in one of the many colleges associated with the University of Salamanca so it was good to have a brief experience of the university life at Spain’s oldest university.

There were many different streams to this conference but the central underlying theme related to the use and application of information technologies within education. I was fortunate enough to present a key note speech at the conference. I will provide details of this in a future post.

In addition to providing my key note talk I was also involved in chairing the Web2.0 special session which involved both myself and my fellow EU Project partners disscussing the various project deliverables of our project. The prevalent theme to emerge from the session was that the Web2.0 platform that we had developed had been successfully engaged by teachers during the pilot study and that our community of practice on Facebook continues to grow.

European Resource Centre for Web2.0 Education Project

Gavin Baxter — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:43:29 +0000

I am just posting details of a new EU Project that I am involved in. It is a very exciting project which is described more in-depth below.

This project aims to enable the mass of educators who find ICT confusing and frightening to have a simple and secure environment to use ICT within their class. Today the ability of educators to use, create content and communicate on the Web is limited by complexity and sophistication of the offers available. Moreover many tools exist and teachers do not have time nor expertise to identify the best solution for their needs. Meanwhile students use and communicate easily and openly using Web2.0 tools (blogs , wikis, social networking, etc) and the technology gap between educators & students grows despite best efforts of national and European agencies. However, these tools have pedagogic value arising from sharing, communication and knowledge discovery that teachers could use to provide a more motivating, engaging, relevant and collaborative environment for students.

There is a clear need for:
- understanding how Web2.0 tools can be used effectively within education
- developing a pedagogy and guides for Web2.0 at an appropriate level for educators
- examples of best practices
- an integrated and secure environment (restricted to educators & their students)
- single source for these tools with appropriate support.
This project will:
- establish a European Resource Centre (ERC) for simplified and targeted Web2.0 tools, for schools, HE and adult education
- provide clear examples of how to use them in class with accompanying pedagogy, guides and videos
- produce a customisable Integrated Web2.0 Platform with Single Sign-On (SSO) for educators to use
- evaluate platform with institutions across Europe
- foster and build collaborative communities to exchange best practice and for experienced Web2.0 educators to mentor new users
- disseminate results.
Impact will be a significant increase in number of educators who can use Web2.0 tools in a pedagogically sound way, leading to an increase in the digital competency of both educators and students.

Should any educators (e.g. primary, secondary, further and higher education, adult education) be interested in this project further details can be found from the following links:

Project Website: The Web 2.0 ERC Project

Facebook page: Web 2.0 ERC

Twitter Page: Web 2.0 ERC EU Project

Journal paper accepted

Gavin Baxter — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:55:19 +0000

I thought I had better add a new post as it is now 2010 and I have not updated my blog since late November of last year! I have been pretty busy of late with research etc. but hope to get quite a few more postings and updates on here…

Luckily for me the first post of 2010 is good news as I have managed to get a journal paper accepted in the journal “The Learning Organization“, publication for May 2010. The paper is called: ‘Organisational blogs: benefits and challenges of implementation’.

The writing of this paper was of great benefit to my research as it allowed me to examine and focus upon organisational issues that might impact on the implementation of new technology in an organisation. The technology that I was concerned with addressing were blogs. In my paper I also devised a set of practical guidelines for management who may be contemplating using blogs in their organisation but who are unsure of how to successfully implement them. These guidelines can also be referred to by academic practitioners who may be interested in conducting their own study of blog use within an organisation.

Inaugural Issue of IJITPM

Gavin Baxter — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:41:25 +0000

Details of the inaugural issue of the “International Journal of Information Technology Project Management” (IJITPM) are now available from IGI Publishing. The special issue is about “Managing Virtual Project Teams.” Any queries regarding topics to be discussed as well as general submissions should be directed to the Guest Editor, Professor Peggy Beranek at: mberanek@uccs.edu Submission due date is: January 15, 2010.

E.C.L.O’s 17th International Conference: Call for Contributions

Gavin Baxter — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:33:17 +0000

The theme for E.C.L.O.’s 17th International Conference is: “Learning Excellence: A Survival Guide in Troublesome Times.” Those interested in contributing a paper and presenting should contact jim.jack@eclo.org. The current conference submission deadline is: 23rd December 2009 of a 200 word contribution abstract.

Blogging – is it really all about the technology?

Gavin Baxter — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:48:24 +0000

What is Web 2.0?

How blogs are used and the nature of blogging itself is often viewed from a technical, personalised or social perspective. One research issue that I wish to address in my research is whether blogging is really all about the technology or the use of it? The answer to such a question could be either yes and no.

Software platforms that support the running of blogs inevitably play an integral role in facilitating the evolvement of blogging in terms of what blog users can do to improve the format of their blogs. The fact that the developments surrounding Web 2.0 are evolving at such an accelerated rate means that bloggers must be aware of them. Such observations throughout the ‘Blogosphere’ will allow bloggers to improve upon the overall appearance and usability of their blogs. It is important though that the developments surrounding blogging software continues to support the fundamentals of content generation.

Despite the technical aspects of blogging being of the upmost relevance what really makes a blog is its content. The fact that blogs revolve around an individual’s personality in terms of ‘their voice’ and what they wish to say means that blogging software must keep abreast of technological developments elsewhere in the sphere of Web 2.0. From this I mean that we can already see how integrative blogs are with blog users being able to incorporate other aspects of social media within their blogs e.g. podcasts, video files and graphics. Within higher education, course management systems such as Blackboard and Moodle are quickly evolving into e-learning platforms that can accommodate various types of social media e.g. wikis, forums and blogs for the purposes of collaboration for project work and feedback. These course management systems will continue to develop through the innovations of social media and with the gradual introduction of Web 3.0 (though I think that many people still have to grapple with the concepts of Web 2.0 prior to Web 3.0′s introduction).

Blogging software (in terms of use and design) is all about supporting what blogging really evolves around – the writing and generation of content. I wish to expand upon this theme in a subsequent post that will discuss issues relating to writing in a blog as well as perceived problems associated with this.

Google Wave Explained

Gavin Baxter — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 10:37:15 +0000

For anyone wishing to know about the new social interactive communication phenomena called ‘Google Wave’ the video below which I came across on YouTube explains it very clearly and concisely. I still think that ‘Google Wave’ has extremely good potential to be used for collaboration and information sharing in organisational project environments.

Blogging versus e-mailing within organisations

Gavin Baxter — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:56:12 +0000

An issue that has often been raised during my research about blogging in organisations is that surely you could write in an e-mail message what you might in a blog post? Is there the need to use a blog to post messages to colleagues when you could simply e-mail what you had to say? Most organisational employees would argue that accessing internal e-mail would be easier than having to search for their company or departmental blog (e.g. on their Intranet or wherever the blog was hosted). Furthermore, dependant upon whom and how many individuals you were sending your e-mail to, e-mails might be viewed as being more private than adding a ‘communal’ post to a blog. With an e-mail, you can also attach documents to it as likewise you can share documents on a blog. Blogs though allow you to upload various types of media file such as video and multi-media graphics.

The main distinction and individuality that I see between blogs and e-mail use within organisations is one of format. The way in which blogs are designed makes them more presentable and easier to use in terms of searching for and locating relevant information. The information contained within blogs is stored chronologically. So if you know the precise information you are looking for it should be easier to ascertain as opposed to looking through countless e-mail folders or trawling through your inbox. The more an individual uses their blog within their organisation, accessing it should become a mere formality and less time consuming to do as first initially thought.

It could be argued that e-mail is a more efficient organisational communication medium when a ‘quick’ response to a question or query is required. A comment to a blog post may not be as initially instant. However, the useful thing about blogs is that when such a response to a post does occur the information contained within it can be stored in a logically presentable way for future reference when called upon in the future.