Group items tagged

"Phew! Talk about pressure. Writing a blog post about how to write a perfect blog post is the most meta of burdens. It's a bit different than writing about perfect tweets or ideal Facebook posts. There's nowhere to hide when you're blogging about perfect blogging. So I hope you'll still trust the advice here even if you don't find this post itself to be flawless. I'm sure we'd all love for each of our blog posts to be absolute perfection-however it is that you measure perfection-so I researched all the necessary info to get us started on the path to perfection. I'll cover headlines and length and visuals and so much more below. How close are you to creating the perfect post already?"

Blog post by Lisa Lane early this month (November 2012 explaining to another online instructor how she built a system for aggregating students' blog posts that may be relevant to WLStudio series and "sharing" activities? She uses FeedWordPress. Excerpt: "Participants set up their own blog wherever. Then I need to get the feeds from those blogs into the Pedagogy First! aggregated blog, using FeedWordPress. I use the Add Link widget (yes, I know it's old) so participants can add their own, and have provided more extensive instructions for them about blogs and feeds. In particular, we want people who post on many subjects to not only use the "potcert" tags for their posts, but use the feed for that tag only. This is so only their class-related posts show up on the class blog. The back end of this process is a little more complicated. When participants enter their information in Add Link, it goes directly into the Blogroll. The Blogroll is what feeds into FeedWordPress as a default. I customize the titles of feeds and the names of participants to use their real names for everything. I change the titles of feeds by going into FWP's Syndication area and using Feeds & Updates. Using the drop down menu to bring up a particular blog, I change the title and click manual control so it doesn't revert back the next time the feed updates. When I do this, it seems to update automatically in the Links area. Then I go to Users and make sure their names are their full names by editing them individually."

blog post by Marc Miller, November 5, 2014, on how LinkedIn Publisher Post expands the number of viewers for blog posts. One of his blog posts published on LinkedIn was picked up and used by LinkedIn Pulse Channel Careers Next Level which generated 14,000 views and drove a lot of traffic to his website.

the importance of getting started, August 21, 2017, on learning

Interesting distinction between blogging and writing articles. Kevin O'Keefe's blog on January 16, 2014 Blogging is done to engage others in a conversation by recognizing the post is one in a series on a topic. Writing an article is to get your point of view out there. Excerpt: I have always viewed blogging as all together different than writing an article. Blogging is a conversation where by listening to relevant discussion you engage those in the conversation. Social media consultant, Jayne Navvare (@jaynenavvare), made the point as well as anyone in her post today. If you want to post "articles" to the web using a blog platform, fine, but do not confuse that with blogging. Articles are static. Blogging is dynamic. Bloggers do more than just write posts. They socialize. Articles are one way. I write it. I distribute it. You read it. Think magazines, newspapers, and newsletters. Circulation and eyeballs are measures of success. Blogs engage. Blogs mix it up with readers and other bloggers. Relationships and word of mouth reputation are measures of success.

Updated blog post by Linda Stone on screen and email apnea, Huffington Post, May 7, 2012. Eighty percent of us seem to have it. I broke the story about it in early 2008 on the Huffington Post, and called the phenomenon, "email apnea." Later in 2008, in talks and interviews, I referred to it interchangeably as "email apnea" and also, as "screen apnea." Definition: Shallow breathing or breath holding while doing email, or while working or playing in front of a screen. Excerpt: Recently, researchers, Gloria Mark, Stephen Voida, and Anthony Cardello, have made headway into formally validating the impact of email, using HRV. Why are we doing this? Our posture is often compromised, especially when we use laptops and smartphones. Arms forward, shoulders forward, we sit in a position where it's impossible to get a healthy and full inhale and exhale. Further, anticipation is generally accompanied by an inhale -- and email, texting, and viewing television shows generally includes a significant dose of anticipation. Meanwhile, the full exhale rarely follows. The stress-related physiology of email apnea or screen apnea is described in some detail in my 2008 post, linked to above. What's the remedy? A new way of interacting with technologies that I call: Conscious Computing. Technologies like the Heartmath emWave2, Huffington Post's GPS for the Soul, and a variety of optimal breathing techniques, can support us in using technologies in healthier ways. Instead of sending an email, call or walk over to your colleague's office. And there's always that other possibility: every now and then, just turn everything off. When you text or use email on your smartphone, when you check and respond to your email, are you breathing or do you hold your breath? Is it worse when you're using a laptop vs. an iPad? How might you incorporate some of the remedies?

Scoop.it blog posted by Jon Koob, March 5, 2014, on content curation 1. What should I post? (What I care about) 2. Switching between platforms to post the same content is a pain (bookmarklet or Google Chrome app) 3. What do I share and where? (different audiences, platforms determine what you post) 4. All content or some content I've curated? (create information hubs for different kinds of sharing) 5. Should I share things more than once? (YES) promo piece for Scoop.it but it seems reasonable anyway

blog post by Jennifer Gilhool, 6.4.2013 "You are connected to work 24/7. You don't need your lap top to be connected. You are connected via BlackBerry, iPhone and iPad to name just a few. These devices no longer provide flexibility. Instead, they tether you to the office. They enable you to work all the time and anywhere. And, now, many companies believe that is the definition of flexibility: "'What flexibility means today is not part time,' the head of work-life at one large organization told me recently. 'What people want is the ability to work anytime, anywhere.' That's true if your target labor pool is twenty-somethings and men married to homemakers. The head of HR at another large organization asked, when I described the hours problem, 'What do you mean, how can we get women to work more hours?'" - Why Men Work So Many Hours, Joan C. Williams, May 29, 2013 Harvard Business Review Why Your Manager Doesn't Want You To Innovate Ron Ashkenas Ron Ashkenas Contributor LinkedIn: Busting 8 Damaging Myths About What It Can Do For Your Career 85 Broads 85 Broads Contributor Someone has taken the "human" out of "Human Resources" departments across America. And, this behavior is not limited to operations in America. I work for a multi-national corporation that cannot seem to wean itself from the 24 hour work day. Colleagues in China often begin their day with a 6:00 a.m. meeting and end it with a meeting that begins at 10:00 p.m. or, worse, 11:00 p.m. To combat this problem, the company leadership agreed to a global meeting policy. The policy provides that global meetings should occur only between the hours of 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. and that no meetings should occur on Friday nights in Asia Pacific. Further, the policy provides a 10 hour fatigue rule. In other words, there should be 10 hours between your last meeting of the day and your first meeting on the next day. First, if you need a global meeting policy, you are in

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. "

Interesting post by Jeffrey Young, August 6, 2015, on George Siemens' reactions to closed door gathering of educators at the White House. Siemens wrote his own blog post linked to in this post. In this post, Young reports that Siemens came away with strong feelings -- "stunned" "exceptionally irritated" and "disappointed" "about what he heard there".

Very interesting how-to write LinkedIn long-posts (blog) by Victoria Pynchon,, July 20, 2014. Her advice is good for regular blog posts, too.

Blog post by William Bowen, March 25, 2013, on movement towards online education. He would like more hard evidence to understand impact/success among other effects, tool kits (platforms), new mind-set to attempt online to reduce costs without adversely affecting educational outcomes, what we must retain in terms of central aspects of life on campus such as "minds rubbing against minds." Excerpts: "My plea is for the adoption of a portfolio approach to curricular development that provides a calibrated mix of instructional styles." ... "Their students, along with others of their generation, will expect to use digital resources-and to be trained in their use. And as technologies grow increasingly sophisticated, and we learn more about how students learn and what pedagogical methods work best in various fields, even top-tier institutions will stand to gain from the use of such technologies to improve student learning." Really like this comment for value of MOOCs for post-college graduates: "A quibble. I am intrigued by your comment about "minds rubbing against minds." While there is undeniable worthiness of the thought inside academic communities perhaps underestimated is the lack of such friction after graduation and how MOOCs can provide opportunities outside the alma maternal environments. To take courses at the local U. costs both in inconvenience of scheduling, transportation and monetary costs equivalent to constantly having a new Hyundai. Those requirements wind up as being unreasonable. Since January I have had the great pleasure of thinking about the thoughts of Dave Ward and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh and arguing about points in the forums. More recently, Michael Sandel on Justice from Boston. These opportunities are enormously better than nothing at all, clearly benefiting myself and probably also friends, colleagues and civil society. While these experiences do not provide the intensity of a post seminar argument in the Ree

Interesting blog post for removing ability to comment on blog posts at Copyblogger by Sonia Simone, 4/2014. Seems that conversation has shifted from blogs to other venues such as Google+ and Twitter ... Copyblogger wants to shift comments to author's blog sites. Final reason is to get out from under the spam which they estimate is about 95% of the comments posted. This "experiment" as they called it interests me because it seems to elevate the role of aggregation tool to scan the web for references to one's work on a regular basis. And it is in line with some of the cMOOC approach--to let the conversation occur anywhere, then capture and make sense of it afterwards.

Really great post on using SlideShare as a visual blog for originating and repurposing content you have already created, March 21, 2014 by Guillaume Decugis. It shows you two Slideshares as examples of what has/has not worked for them. It could mean taking photographs we already have and entering a little text to make one point per slide. They upped their slideshare postings to one a week along with at least one blog post per week.

Blog post by Sylvia Browder at the Story Exchange--where women mean business. "Challenge 2: Undefined Niche To Niche or Not to Niche…that is the question. What is a niche? A niche business is one that targets a very specific group of people with specific shared interest. A business with an undefined niche is like a ship sailing in shallow water. By creating a niche business allows you to market to your ideal clients. For example, if you were a behavioral psychologist targeting teens, you would market your services in places where parents are likely to find out about you; such as advertising in parent magazines, providing resources to local middle and high schools or joining organizations geared towards parents. Solution: By understanding who and where your ideal customers are; it is easy to craft a marketing plan to target them. Here are three easy ways to target your potential clients: * Improve your website's SEO with specific key words * Generate exposure locally and virtually with professional speaking, seminars or publishing a book or articles. * Craft a clear message that speak at the heart of your customer " Challenge 4: No Social Media Plan Random tweets and meandering Facebook posts will result in a lot of time devoted to zero results. Before making another useless post, sit down with pen and paper and make a list of what you want to achieve from social media. To which social media do you belong? What are some social media marketing strategies that you have noticed from other companies? What do you have that will offer value? You may find that your company is spread a little too thin across the social media spectrum. Quality truly is superior to quantity in this respect. Solution: Create a social media marketing plan and stay the long haul. Establishing a strong presence can be a very time consuming process. It is unwise to expect your list of fans, followers or subscribers to grow overnight.

Blog post by Darren Rouse, June 2, 2014, from Problogger about socializing your blog posts to get more readers/coverage. Has great infograph comparing Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn.

article by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 15, 2015, on how colleges are eliminating or reducing or redesigning lectures in class to make them available online outside of class hours, mixing them with interactive questions and discussion, and making them shorter.

article by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 15, 2015, on how colleges are eliminating or reducing or redesigning lectures in class to make them available online outside of class hours, mixing them with interactive questions and discussion, and making them shorter. 

"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,

blog post on Mashable on how to create your online identity 5 tips 1. Google your name--see who you are competing against in terms of name recognition 2. Own your name--get LinkedIn profile and pictures to show up first by creating a name specific URL at LinkedIn 3. Block and tackle on social networks such as Facebook to only share certain info with the public or limit Facebook content to friends only. 4. Advance the ball forward--create some great content in the first page of results; some apps help with that--Brandyourself 5. Make your own plays--showcase your expertise in a blog post, answer a question on Quora or comment on an article.

blog post by Susan J. Ellis, Energize, February 2017, great post for helping volunteers thrive in moving org mission