Group items tagged

An interesting blog post by Ian Cleary, April 2014, Razor Social, to improve websites for conversions (among other related topics) Tools for driving traffic and converting viewers 1. Landing Page Tools--Lead Pages is a software 2. Analytics software 3. Marketing automation software 4. Competitor research tools 5. Content sharing tools

For many small businesses, open source software represents an unexplored gold mine. When you run a small business, budgets are always tight. While you need many of the same kinds of software that larger businesses need, you don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on that software like bigger companies do.

good article on value of open source software by Ernie Smith, Associaitons Now, June 16, 2015

Georgia Tech does a lot of its courses online and is encouraging more courses to go online. Some questions have been raised about the quality that I am still trying to explore. But the excerpt below on FAQ--last question--might be useful to us in describing our courses. Excerpt: "FAQ Will I get a certificate after completing this class? Certificate of Completion will be provided by Georgia Tech C21U What resources will I need for this class? You will a good internet connection as you may be downloading software, installing software and uploading files. What is the coolest thing I'll learn if I take this class? You will learn how to convert your face-to-face class to a robust online course"

"Openlab Workshops' mission is to use open source and free software tools and knowledge to both enable and inspire people's creativity. We are part of the open source and free software community because of their idealistic emphasis on transparency, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration. Since 2009 we've developed and taught over 24 workshops in such topics as programming for artists and designers using Processing, interactive lighting, livecoding, Arduino, and sound generation and analysis."

My cousin Evan Raskob's Openlab Workshop site. They are f2f workshops, but the concept is to bring diverse people together to create and share knowledge about digital art and technology.

"A Curated List of THE coolest, newest, most handy tools, apps and software from around the web."

13 apps and programs recommended in Alex Pang's The Distraction Addiction. Maybe useful for uncluttering and intentional priorities learning labs. Appeared in Elle October 11, 2013

interesting list of tools, none of which I have heard of, although their functions make sense to me

Video by Clay Johnson on import of health information diet, big think website. April 24, 2013. Rescuetime.com--measures your intake of info on computer--makes you a more conscious consumer, how much time spending on email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Loves samebox.com--for pay subscription service--advanced spam filter, only puts important messages before you, emails you a digest at the end of every day of everything else Trying to live an ad free lifestyle--just as expensive as paying for content. ex--Domino's pizza commercial convinces you to buy pizza instead of making dinner. Use ad block on firefox and chrome to reduce exposure to ads. Cut cable to stop exposure to TV advertisements--"makes for weird bar conversations sometimes"

This paper written by George Siemens in 2008 on Learning in Networks raises issues very similar to those we are raising in our discussion at CPSquare. This paper also has implications for how the Women's Learning Studio is launched into practice in its discussion of teacher as learning atelier, concierge, etc. Google Scholar, Scopus, and open access journals offer increased access to academic resources; an extension to more informal approaches such as regular internet search and Wikipedia. Social software (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, instant messaging, Skype, Ning) provide opportunities for learners to create, dialogue about, and disseminate information. But what becomes of the teacher? How do the practices of the educator change in networked environments, where information is readily accessible? How do we design learning when learners may adopt multiple paths and approaches to content and curriculum? How can we achieve centralized learning aims in decentralized environments? This paper will explore the shifting role of educators in networked learning, with particular emphasis on curatorial, atelier, concierge, and networked roles of educators, in order to assist learners in forming diverse personal learning networks for deep understanding of complex fields.

Can't find the date on this but Quertime lists 15 of the most widely used web forum platforms that we might want to explore. It does list BuddyPress as well. phpBB looks interesting, as does zetaboards, and maybe PunBB.

Great article by Susan Weinschenk, Brain Wise: Work better, work smarter, September 11, 2012, and why dopamine keeps us "seeking" when we already have enough information. excerpt: Do you ever feel like you are addicted to email or twitter or texting? Do you find it impossible to ignore your email if you see that there are messages in your inbox? Do you think that if you could ignore your incoming email or messages you might actually be able to get something done at work? You are right!" ... "Instead of dopamine causing you to experience pleasure, the latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search. It increases your general level of arousal and your goal-directed behavior. From an evolutionary stand-point this is critical. The dopamine seeking system keeps you motivated to move through your world, learn, and survive. It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes you curious about ideas and fuels your searching for information. Research shows that it is the opioid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure." Turn off the cues - One of the most important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more productive is to turn off the cues. Adjust the settings on your cell phone and on your laptop, desktop or tablet so that you don't receive the automatic notifications. Automatic notifications are touted as wonderful features of hardware, software, and apps. But they are actually causing you to be like a rat in a cage. If you want to get work done you need to turn off as many auditory and visual cues as possible. It's the best way to prevent and break the dopamine loops. What do you think? How do you deal with dopamine loops? Are you willing to turn off your cues?

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

Interesting cultural studies piece in the NYTimes about unwanted email. The law is that marketers and businesses must have an option to let you unsubscribe, but fledgling businesses or friends' businesses fall through the cracks. What to do about it? Some new software, hitting delete, creating an email account you never use or view.

article by Martin Dewhurst and Paul Willmott, September 2014 on new leadership skills required in age of new information technologies Machines force executives and senior leaders to: 1. open up their companies through crowdsourcing and social platforms within and across organizational boundaries 2. create data sets worthy of the most intelligent machines 3. "let go" in ways that run counter to a century of OD 4. executives...able to make the biggest difference through the human touch. ...questions they frame, their vigor in attaching exceptional circumstances highlighted by increasingly intelligent algorithms ... tolerating ambiguity and focusing on the "softer" side of management to engage the organization and build its capacity for self-renewal. 5. turbocharged data-analytics strategy, a new top-team mind-set, fresh talent approaches, and a concerted effort to break down information silos...transcend number crunching..."weak signals" from social media and other sources also contain powerful insights and should be part of the data-creation process. 6. ...early movers will probably gain insights of unstructured data, such as email discussions between representatives or discussion threads in social media. 7. ...dashboards don't create themselves. Senior executives must find and set the software parameters needed to determine, for instance, which data gets prioritized and which gets flagged for escalation. 8. ...odds of sinking under the weight of even quite valuable insights grow as well. Answer: democratizing it: encouraging and expecting the organization to manage itself without bringing decisions upward. ...business units and functions will be able to make more and better decisions on their own. 9. 8 will happen even as the CEO begins to morph into a "chief experimentation officer," who draws from acute observance of early signals to bolster a company's ability to experiment at scale. 10. need to "let go" will be more significant and the discomfort of s

Capterra lists survey vendors, Survey Monkey way down the list, but Capterra's motivation and method for building the list are not clear to me.

Has important considerations for choosing right digital devices based on purpose and nature of work to be done--Robin L. Flanigan, EdWeek, June 11, 2015.

from The Future of Work. Elizabeth Segran "For women in tech, a humanities background can be an added liability, since there is already a perception that they are less competent at science and math. Danielle Sheer says that when she joined Carbonite, her first impulse was to hide her lack of knowledge and retreat at meetings. However, she quickly changed strategy, deciding it was more important for her to ask questions to fully grasp the technology. She's spent hours tinkering with the software and working with engineering teams to learn about it. She says her colleagues are supportive, even if she sometimes slows them down. "By articulating complicated technical or strategic ideas in plain English, you'd be amazed at how much progress we've made solving problems," she says. "We've become very good at assuming that we don't have the same definition.""

"Innovation often comes from where you least expect it and harnessing collective intelligence, the core principle of Web 2.0 as well as Enterprise 2.0, is the very art of eliciting value from emergent systems such as the Web and our intranets. That this value is forming the bulk of the networked economy (open source software, social networks, social media sharing, etc.) is one of the signature lessons of the era of open business models and 2.0."

Dion Hinchcliffe's blogs are very interesting and he has great graphics. He also explores stats to show ROI in the networked age, or explains why they are not forthcoming. His home page is: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe

A truly inspiring nonprofit organization in Africa, that has not only developed an open source software for mapping crowdsourced data as it comes in - real time data collection - but has developed an internet platform and start-up incentive program for Africa. Clay Shirky used them as an example of the Culture of Generosity in his TED talk and book, Cognitive Surplus.

I've already donated to them! Very inspiring org.