Group items tagged

Importance of learning online to replace formal degree seeking activities by Lolly Daskal and Matthew Brimer, founder of General Assembly, turning thinkers into creaters "Luckily for you, there are now a ton of educational resources and pathways to learn web design and hone your skills, available both online and offline, without the requirement of pursuing a traditional college degree. When hiring a designer, most employers today care about your portfolio over your resume, your creative talent over your GPA, and your ability to produce great work over the name brand of the school you attended."

As I was reviewing Nancy White's blogs, one included a link to this page on virtual leadership development. Knowing Nancy, I was confident that it would be good and it is. What I like about it is the emphasis on developing leadership skills within an organization for a bunch of people, not just a few named leaders at the top. Plus the integration of the online work with an onsite team that chooses and collaborates on a critical issue in the workplace--this is real world leadership to solve problems facing the organization or environment, etc.

Great blog post by Pamela Wilson on how images market more than words; identifies resources, too. istockphoto.com: This is the site I go to first. The search capabilities are great, the selection is vast (and growing) and you can even search by color and composition. (If you want to run your text along the right side of a photo, you can search for photos that have open areas along the right side, for example.) shutterstock.com: Another excellent (and vast) collection of high-quality images. dreamstime.com: I haven't used this much, but it looks promising. It claims to have the least expensive stock photos, and the quality looks good. Free stock photos stock.xchng: The granddaddy of free stock photo sites. The free offerings are shown along with tempting paid offerings from a sister site, but if you can resist the urge to upgrade to paid, there are plenty of good images here. morguefile.com: Don't let the name fool you. A morgue file, as I learned in art school, is where one keeps photo and image references to be used in the future. This is the Internet's morgue file, and is assembled by creative people and freely shared.

part of the interview with Sonia Simone and Jerod Morris at Copyblogger following their decision several weeks ago to close down comments on the Copyblogger blog site. Excerpt: "I don't put my business assets on a platform that I don't control. So I don't put my content on a platform I don't control unless I have it somewhere I can keep it and benefit from it. I wouldn't post original content to Facebook. I would just never - it doesn't make a lot of sense, other than just a post, a simple throw-away kind of a post. So our content lives on our domain, in our e-mail lists. These are assets we can control. " I'm not sure exactly what she means by "content lives on our domain, in our e-mail lists." Maybe it's as simple as it's Copyblogger's stuff, they own it, it's only used to achieve their business purposes and it isn't original stuff that is published elsewhere or stored there on someone else's platform for digestion and use? Blog post also introduces "digital sharecropping" to me. Interesting note about Google-Plus, too. "The nice thing about Google-Plus is I'm notified when someone actually mentions my name, or if I'm following that discussion then I'm notified within Gmail or Google-Plus, any one of the Google products. So it's nice in that way. There's a lot more ease of use. "

Blog by Gwen Teatro, You're Not the Boss of Me is name of blog, September 14, 2014. Identifies five elements that I believe are right on for real teams: 1. Everyone on the team clearly understands its purpose 2. Individuals on the team each know their roles in fulfilling the purpose 3. Individuals on the team see their roles as being no more, or no leass important than anyone else's 4. We pay attention to the team dynamic every time a new member is introduced 5. The team works together until its purpose is fulfilled.

LA Times article by Matt Pearce, January 20, 2013 on infrequent Office MAx customer who received a solicitation from Office Max with his name on it followed, by "Daughter Killed in Car Crash." How did the company get the information and why did it appear on the envelope because the recipient had lost his daughter in a car crash a year before?

Volume XI, Number 4, Winter 2005/2006, Evaluation Exchange newsletter, Harvard Family Research Project, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Amy-Mae Elliott names three advance tweet schedulers in this post from 2013--LaterBro, Future Tweets, and Twuffer--with equal endorsements.

Great 19 minute podcast with Buffy Hamilton, Unquiet Librarian, on why libraries are great places for connected learning. This podcast produced by Connected Learning Alliance, a national initiative led by Mimi Ito and other big names on Making Learning Relevant has lessons for WLS. The podcast design itself The content, especially the emphasis on libraries (substitute WLS) as incubator hubs, making learning relevant by working from the learner's point of need, interest and project driven, etc.

a wonderful blog post by Jim McGee, April 1, 2002, on the importance of keeping a knowledge-log--k-log--for being able to retrace one's steps when the final conclusion/work product falls short and one has to start over and for engaging with others about how the thought line developed. Justifies paper printouts and variously named file versions to show stages of idea exploration and development. Our electronic work flow replaces how we used to work with handwritten drafts with all the erasures and column notes, then send them to a graphics person for placing into a graphics format, then circulating for reaction from involved stakeholders, some of them junior staff, then incorporating feedback, final edits, and voila! a product for the client.

Funny, brief, under 2 minute video on weak ties between networks and their value in closing structural holes by Dalton Conley. Groups and Networks is name of video.

SeniorNet, an international(?) nonprofit organization run by volunteers out of Ft. Myers, FL to serve adults 55+. Hmmmm.

article by Joyce E. A. Russell, 10/28/2012, Capital Business, Wash Post on competitors collaborating.

"Group administrators can change a group's privacy settings at any time by visiting the group's Admin tab > Group Settings. Group roles BuddyPress group members have three roles available to them. Members: By default, when a user joins a group, he or she has the role of member. What does it mean to be a member of a BuddyPress group? That depends on what kind of group it is. In a public group, members are able to post to that group's forums, as well as submit content to other parts of the group (for instance, group members can upload documents in conjunction with the BuddyPress Group Documents plugin). When a user posts to the discussion forum of a public group, the user automatically becomes a member of the group. Additionally, being a member of a group means having the group's activity aggregated in your Activity > My Groups activity stream. In a private group or a hidden group, members have all the same privileges as members in a public group. Additionally, being a member of a private group means that you get to see who else is a member of the group, and that you're able to send invites to other users. Moderators: When a group member is promoted to be a moderator of the group, it means that the member receives the following additional abilities: Edit group details, including the group name and group description (see: #4737) Edit, close, and delete any forum topic or post in the group Edit and delete other kinds of content, as produced by certain plugins Administrators: Administratorshave total control over the contents and settings of a group. That includes all the abilities of moderators, as well as the ability to: Change group-wide settings (Admin > Settings). For instance, administrators can turn group forums on or off, change group status from public to private, and toggle on or off various other group functionality provided by plugins Change the group avatar (Admin > Group Avatar) Manage group members (Admin > Manage Members). More specifically,

useful suggestions for branding and markeing

Post in WP discussion forum on how unhelpful so-called help discussion forums really are. Excerpt: "I signed up for WP AT Godaddy,com and have the same question, so I have to come here and do whatever I can understand of what i'm told. my universal experience with forums like this - here at WP and at the forums which serve as the ONLY assistance for non-paying users of third party design businesses -is that genuinely inexperienced people are not-so-subtly encourage to self-select out. people who need help make it very clear that they are really inexperienced, beg for step-by-step directions and get responses they cannot decipher or use. And if they have the temerity to say so, well, here's the first forum i clicked under this topic: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-set-up-on-wordpress-site?replies=3 the forum was simply shut down. lol? I don't understand why experienced users who know how to do things bother to make such replies. Is there some club somewhere where such things are on display for the amusement of our betters? Because unintentionally or not, it seems gratuitously mean. "

Branding used to be purely for businesses, but that's not the case anymore. Personal branding has taken off and in recent years become quite popular, especially with young professionals. Personal branding is when you have a specific look, feel, or message associated with your name. Using social media, anyone can create their own personal brand.

blog by nonprofitwithballs on funding people to do the work in nonprofits not projects, consultants, workshops, and redirecting capacity builders back to basics

Organizations Directory 7 Billion Actions is a call to action for corporations and NGOs. All around the globe, organizations have answered this call by mobilizing their employees and partners to get involved. Organizations of all kinds, in every part of the world, are creating innovative programs that address issues associated with a world of 7 billion.

I like the array of logos they used to announce the organizations . . . wonder how they decided who went where . . . on the first screen, I immediately saw two orgs I have been affiliated with, and wondered if there might be more but didn't see any I had personal experience with. Were they linked to their sites? I didn't check. Also, for courses, I wonder if we need tags and more of a profile other than a logo and name for folks to find what they need fast.

Great article by Lydia Dishman in Fast Company on making meetings matter.