Here is a concise and somehow cryptic summary of some ideas that will be explained and developped in the Vol. 2 of "The semantic Sphere". Via Maria João 
In terms of intellectual fulfillment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate. That keeps blogging at the top of the heap Martin Weller, April 29, 2012 ... This trend is evident in academic practice. Previously if I wanted to convey an idea or a research finding, my choices were limited to a conference paper or journal article or, if I could work it up, a book. These choices still remain, but in addition I can create a video, podcast, blog post, slidecast, and more. It may be that a combination of these is ideal—a blog post gets immediate reaction and can then be worked into a conference presentation, shared through SlideShare, or turned into a paper that is submitted to a journal. In each case the blog or social network becomes a key route for sharing and disseminating the findings. One recent study suggests that use of Twitter, for instance, can both boost and predict citations of journal articles. ... So blogging works for me, but it might not work for you. Maybe you're more of a YouTube person, or a podcaster, or maybe your skill really lies in acting as a filter and a curator, using a tool such as Scoop.it, which allows you to curate and share resources on a particular topic. Or maybe you're the trusted source for finding the valuable research in your field. It's clear, though, that our academic ecosystem is a more complex one now. This raises two difficult questions for academics who are expected to do research: First, do these new types of activity count as scholarship? And, if so, how do we recognize and reward them? ... In my book The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (Bloomsbury USA, 2011; free online), ... http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml ... I argue that if you look across all scholarly activities, the use of new technology has the potential to change practice. For example, those who teach now have access to abundant, free, online content, while in the past teaching resources were often scarce and expensive. 
Digital, Networked and Open ‘Dad, you know that book you're writing, what's it about?’ my daughter asked, as I walked her to school. The ‘elevator pitch’ is always difficult for academics, who prefer to take their time to explain things in depth and give all sides to an argument. An elevator pitch for a nine-year-old is almost impossible. ‘Well,’ I pondered, ‘it's about how using technology like the Internet, dad's blog, and Wikipedia is changing the way people like daddy work.’ Having recently completed a school project, she was well acquainted with Wikipedia. She considered this and then concluded, ‘da-aaaaad, no one's going to want to read that!’ I fear she may be right, but I realised I have been writing this book for the past four years, mainly through my blog, which I have been using to explore what the advent of technologies, which offer new ways of communicating, collaborating and creating knowledge, mean for higher education. I figured if it had kept me interested for this long, it might be useful to share some of that with others. So what are these new ways of working that I had hinted at to my daughter? I'll start with an example that is in your hands now – the process of writing this book. Six years ago I wrote my last book, and halfway through writing this, I thought I'd compare the two processes. Below is a list of some of the tools and resources I used to write this book:
by Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr, Kristen Purcell, Mary Madden and Joanna Brenner, Released: April 4, 2012 ... 21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them. ... One-fifth of American adults (21%) report that they have read an e-book in the past year, and this number increased following a gift-giving season that saw a spike in the ownership of both tablet computers and e-book reading devices such as the original Kindles and Nooks.1 In mid-December 2011, 17% of American adults had reported they read an e-book in the previous year; by February, 2012, the share increased to 21%. ... The rise of e-books in American culture is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material. Using a broader definition of e-content in a survey ending in December 2011, some 43% of Americans age 16 and older say they have either read an e-book in the past year or have read other long-form content such as magazines, journals, and news articles in digital format on an e-book reader, tablet computer, regular computer, or cell phone. ... Those who have taken the plunge into reading e-books stand out in almost every way from other kinds of readers. Foremost, they are relatively avid readers of books in all formats: 88% of those who read e-books in the past 12 months also read printed books.2 Compared with other book readers, they read more books. They read more frequently for a host of reasons: for pleasure, for research, for current events, and for work or school. They are also more likely than others to have bought their most recent book, rather than borrowed it, and they are more likely than others to say they prefer to purchase books in general, often starting their search online. ... The growing popularity of e-books and the adoption of specialized e-book reading devices are documented in a series of new nationally representative surveys by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that look at the public’s general reading habits, their consumption of print books, e-books and audiobooks, and their attitudes about the changing ways that books are made available to the public. 
Books at last are going digital – bringing to an end the futile period of paper books losing out to digital journals. With prices falling and instant availability leading to the growth of people reading ebooks, Patrick Dunleavy foresees a renaissance of books as a major format in social science teaching, research, and impacts work. This push-back is strongly supported by the increasing emphasis on the impacts agenda; by increased attention to citations and real audience sizes; and by improved professionalism in the communication of the social sciences. ... This year we reached a turning point in the unavailing struggle of conservative publishers (and authors) to stick with paper books in a digital age. (1) At last academic books across the social sciences have begun to go digital in enough numbers, and in the right useable formats, to be competitive again in social science teaching. There are two foundations for forecasting a renaissance of books’ influence across the social sciences – first, the digital publishing shift itself; and second, a range of other supportive changes in academic practices. ... The digital shift in academic publishing Summing up the lessons of digital change for higher education, Larry Summers (2) recently remarked: ‘Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could’. The digital shift is already unravelling and re-knitting the practice of modern scholarship in myriad ways, some charted by Martin Weller in his key book. (3) But even he missed some elements – such as the rise of multi-author blogs (4) – and how quickly many ‘reputation’ problems in parts of the digital sphere may prove manageable as major universities get involved, a critical mass of expert reader/debaters is created, and new developments (like altmetrics) (5) occur. ... In the complex digital shift for books, four main developments are already in train or imminent. First, publishers like Oxford University Press are releasing some student-accessible intermediate texts and more overt textbooks in great formats. A university library subscribes to the ebook, and then students can freely access and download all the chapters in PDF form, save them and use them in just the same way as journal articles. Suddenly you can list these books on Moodle and your whole class or seminar group has instant access to all of the book – wiping out at a stroke the crippling disadvantages of paper books discussed in Part 1 of this blog. (6)
*********************************************** (1) (2) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/the-21st-century-education.html?pagewanted=all
... (3)
... (4) http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2012/02/24/five-minutes-patrick-dunleavy-chris-gilson/
As a business owner, it may be hard to delegate time for yourself or your employees to write quality content for your blog vs. work on revenue generating projects.
And when it comes to content, we’re not talking about just any content, but content that people want to read, search engines want to crawl, and social media users want to share. Finding Guest Bloggers One of the first things to increase the content on your blog, is including guest bloggers to help you out. Guest bloggers get a lot of benefits by writing for other sites, including yours, such as exposure to a new audience, the chance to build their authority, and the ability to build quality links back to their own blog or website. How to Create Guest Blogging Guidelines The easiest way to attract guest bloggers to your blog is through the creation of a guest blogging guidelines page. Share details by including the following: http://bit.ly/J5KCHB **Your impressive blog stats **Your audience’s interests and demographics **What topics your blog covers **What level of content you need **Content originality **Post formatting details **Post submission requirements **Community rules **Self-promotion rules **Disclaimers What to Look for in Guest Post Submissions You will want to make sure the content meets the quality standards of your blog by reading it thoroughly and checking for a few key things: **Is the content original? **Who is the author? **Where does the author link to? Establishing an Editorial Calendar No matter where you get your online content from, whether it is guest bloggers or freelance writers, be sure to create an editorial calendar. Via maxOz 
Many small businesses have turned to blogging as a way to engage and further connect with customers. But making mistakes in your blog can kill your business. Here are some of the biggest to avoid.
Blogging for your business is important, but doing it wrong can cost you customers and your reputation. As more and more small businesses enter the world of content development, the scrutiny continues to increase. Consumers can be retained or lost simply from your blogging efforts, so its imperative this public-facing activity is done correctly.
In this guide, we'll explore why small businesses should have a blog, a company that is doing it right, the biggest mistakes made by small businesses, and how to avoid those potential pitfalls.
7 Blogging Mistakes that Small Businesses Make: Why Start a Blog?
Read more: http://bit.ly/IX3t9i Via Martin Gysler 
You're about to discover the best writing books to help you write fiction, nonfiction, novels, poetry, shortsStories, get published & market your writing... ... For any writer who aspires to be an author, knowing how to get a book published is essential. It's a common scenario — you have an idea for a book but you have no way of knowing how to translate that idea from your computer screen into print or online. ... Now, more than at any other time in history, there are more opportunities and possibilities to write, share, and publish a story — and interact with an audience. Whether you are after the traditional publishing experience, complete with an agent, editor, and publisher, or want to self publish your book, it's completely within your grasp. You decide what works best for you and your work. ... We're going to guide you through the book publishing process and give you the resources to choose which publishing option fits your work best. But first, you should know about traditional and self-publishing. 
A graduate student at the MIT Media Lab is writing software that can highlight false claims in articles, just like spell check. Via Howard Rheingold, k3hamilton 
This piece was written by ahava-leibta for contentmarketinginstitute
"They all have four key elements that make up the code for building great content".
Here are some highlights:
There are some basic steps you need to follow before you apply these elements to have a successful campaign:
**Branding/messaging: Who are you, and what do you represent and offer? What do you need to say?
**How can you provide value to your customers?
**User profiles or personas: Who are you trying to reach?
**What do they care about?
**Where and across what channels do they consume content?
**Define the campaign
Selected by Jan Gordon covering "Content Marketing, Social Media and Beyond"
Read full article here: [http://bit.ly/IeWzxV] Via janlgordon 
I got the idea to make a post about WordPress plugins for writers. I use a few which help me and thought I’d share them. But, I found something interesting when I started looking around to see what other writers like to use. Almost every plugin written about as being “for writers” was for SEO in blogging. Almost none of the plugins reviewed as “for writers” were about writing. Does anyone else think that’s kind of a sad reflection on writing? ... Here are the plugins I use which help me with actual writing online (not blog promoting – but blog writing).
But I think it has promise, and I’m particularly intrigued by the way Reddy and Mascia have transcended simple media sharing, through design choices that make Kullect into something more like a tool for storytelling.
How is storytelling different from media sharing? Open up any of today’s top mobile media-sharing networks on your smartphone—like Instagram or Picplz for photos, Klip for videos, or Path for group sharing—and what you see is a random stream of disconnected items, stretching infinitely from today into last week, last month, and last year. Each individual item in a stream may represent somebody’s special moment or act of curation, but there are no mechanisms within these platforms for ordering things or imposing a theme. No pattern emerges. It’s just one damn thing after another. Via Gregg Morris 
Joe Brockmeier, March 12, 2012 A superb collaborative notepad site. Easily link to videos, audio, images, websites and other notepad pages. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools The collaboration features allow you to invite users to your "pads" and edit documents in real time. There's a very slight lag when another user is editing the same pad, but it's negligible. If you're working on code of some sort, Hackpad offers syntax highlighting for HTML, JavaScript, C, SQL, Java, CoffeeScript, and a number of other languages and markup syntaxes. You can create a new pad while you're editing another one by using "@" symbol. This makes it really easy to create new pads and you don't have to use the normal annoying wiki syntax for pages. You can also "notify" people who have Hackpad accounts with the @username syntax, which will send them an email. Hackpad also supports to-do lists, just by dropping in a "[]" you can add a checklist item. This makes it dead easy to create a checklist for a team, or just for yourself. Hackpad supports rich media, if you drop in links from supported sites. For instance, drop in a link to a YouTube video and you'll get a preview of the video. This also works with Vimeo, SoundCloud, Flickr, Slideshare, Google Maps, TED, and a number of other sites.
Via ICTmagic |
Publishers Weekly ( @PublishersWkly ) correspondent Judith Rosen ( @Judith2dogs ) reports on the conference Unbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book ( #unbound ) held May 3-4 at MIT.
Ahead of the launch of EUROPP – an academic blog investigating matters of European politics and policy – next week, Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson discuss social scientists’ obligation to spread their research to the wider world and how blogging can help academics break out of restrictive publishing loops. ... LSE’s Public Policy Group already run two academic blogs and you are preparing to launch two more in the coming months. Yet many academics are still sceptical about the value of blogging. What is it that gives you so much confidence in academic blogging as a means of dissemination and engagement? ... One of the recurring themes (from many different contributors) on the Impact of Social Science blog is that a new paradigm of research communications has grown up – one that de-emphasizes the traditional journals route, and re-prioritizes faster, real-time academic communication in which blogs play a critical intermediate role. They link to research reports and articles on the one hand, and they are linked to from Twitter, Facebook and Google+ news-streams and communities. So in research terms blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now. 
Patrick Dunleavy ... Three years ago, drawing up my reading lists for the new academic year, I realized that I had almost stopped setting books altogether, in favour of journal articles. The reasons were simple. University reading lists are now generally held on some form of electronic ‘learning management system’ (LMS), such as Moodle (now claiming 58 million student users) or Blackboard. If I include journal articles on my Moodle reading list, students have instant one-click access to a free electronic copy (via LSE’s library). They can download PDFs, and keep them permanently in full text form beyond the seminar week, using the electronic article for later essay writing and revising for exams. In addition, the whole class can access and read the same materials simultaneously. And I can add journal articles right up to the last minute in digital on-demand form. ... Academics were also in digital denial in a big way, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Here books remained a core medium of scholarly communication. And often in these areas referencing practices have been so poor for so long that very many journal articles are not cited by anyone – especially in the humanities. Hence academics were mad keen to hang onto books, as the only things that got (lightly) cited. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/ ... The turning point So this is where we stand today in the social sciences, at a very bad pass for books and even more for edited books and book chapters. But luckily the story does not end there, because many of the trends of the last two decades have now begun to change. We have in short reached a turning point, a moment in history when a renaissance of books’ influence can be foreseen across our disciplines. The key to this change is that books stop being only or even primarily paper products, and make the transition to ebooks and other digital forms. In addition, there are also many other newly favourable influences, such as the rise of the impacts agenda. 
Offering an economical alternative to commercial publishing, e-presses can satisfy preferences for open access and print-on-demand. Agata Mrva-Montoya writes that academic e-presses are the best fit for the future of academic publishing. ... Undoubtedly, open access is one of the best tools used to ensure the broad dissemination of scholarship: SUP’s top-downloaded book Let sleeping dogs lie? (1) has had over 11,500 downloads since its release in October 2010. ANU e-press titles were downloaded over four million times in 2011. ... Many researchers, university administrators, librarians and governments believe that if the research has been funded by public money and carried out at a government-funded university, the results should be made available to the general public for free. In fact, many of research grant organisations make open access compulsory within a specific timeframe, for example the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC), the US National Institutes of Health and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Earlier this year, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) released a statement supporting open access mandate. (2) ************************** (1) http://purl.library.usyd.edu.au/sup/9781920899684 
Levi Bryant has a great post on the problem with the term "construction." I think his point echoes those that Latour has been making for some time. The alternative is a kind of anecdotal sharing. And I am fully in support of talking about teaching! As one of my grad school mentors, Steve North, discussed long ago, the "lore" of the hallway and office is one of the central sites of teaching knowledge. Lore has its own kind of networks, its own constructedness. However, lore has a different relationship than assessment to other (knowledge) objects. Conventionally we might say that when we shift from lore to scholarship about teaching that this is a purely discursive shift or that it is about social-power relations. These things are partly true I think, but they are only part of the story. The other part is that research is constructed differently and thus has different strengths in its mediation of network relations, and this construction is not "purely" discursive. It has to do with the world of objects as well. ... So, for example, we might anecdotally say that our undergrads are good at the close reading of texts but struggle with incorporating secondary sources, that they convey a real enthusiasm for the literature they read but are ambivalent about critical methods. (I don't know if any of these things are true. This is purely a hypothetical example.) Actually it's a little more than hypothetical. It reflects broad common assumptions about students and about what is difficult to do in English or more generally in college. These anecdotal things we say about students are largely stable over the years, but interestingly they have little impact on curriculum. We might exchange lore about how we try to address these concerns, but those exchanges do not add up to a substantive change. However we try, to whatever extent we try, anecdotal sharing doesn't create knowledge objects with the force necessary to make change happen. ... I think this is clearly evident. However, we could start an assessment from the anecdotal hypothesis that students struggle with incorporating secondary sources into their writing. We could create a tool that measures these incorporations so that we might construct some knowledge across the program about student performance that might help us fine tune our anecdotal observations and link them together with greater strength. Then (the big step), we might move the issue out of the student and into the network. That is, rather than identifying poor research practices as a student deficiency, we could understand them as a network effect. We could ask, how could we alter the conditions of the classroom and the curriculum to alter this network effect? This goes far beyond the advice of lore because it demands a significant shift in the conditions in the department: a shift that lore is not strong enough to produce. ... This is why, when it comes to assessment, I always ask "What kind of knowledge would we require in order to make a substantive change?" That question asks not only about the specific knowledge statement but the process by which the knowledge is constructed. Anecdotes are not strong enough. And my concern for the humanities is that it doesn't believe that any knowledge is strong enough to make such decisions. This, of course, does not mean that curriculum doesn't happen or that changes don't occur. It simply means that we deny ourselves the opportunity to produce knowledge that is strong enough to inform decision-making. Instead we are left with individual feelings, opinions, and beliefs and whatever they amount to. A skeptic might say that this is all that humanistic knowledge has ever been. Via Ana Cristina Pratas 
Fay, a mother and a musician, described how she was able to network with a whole worldwide community of musicians through Google + and even “jam” with musicians across the world through Google +’s video chat feature called Hangouts. Via IBooks Author 
As more textbook publishing companies produce a greater number of digital textbooks – or e-books – college students are expected to purchase these electronic versions in increasing numbers as time goes on. Via Mike King 
Teaching English simply for test preparation rather than to develop a love of literature is a mistake. ... By CLAIRE NEEDELL HOLLANDER. April 20, 2012 ... FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation. ... Times Topic: Education ... 
Today’s publishers, still entangled in the dying Gutenberg age, will, one hopes, spin off their talented editors as semi-autonomous units and gradually disencumber themselves of their obsolete infrastructure. Via Luca Baptista 
Robin Good: Surfmark is a new content curation service introducing some innovative and forward-looking features.
Surfmark in fact provides not only standard capabilities to easily capture, collect and organize content from any web page, but it adds intelligently alternative display formats to allow the exploration of such collections in multiple ways.
Another key innovative feature of Surfmark is its ability to generate bibliographies and summaries of content collections.
Surfmark allows social collaborative curation, history of all edits made, and the ability to share publicly or keep a collection private.
Collections can be downloaded in PDF or text formats and all pages saved in a collection are fully preserved with all the formatting and links intact so that you can refer back to exactly what you saw.
Free to use.
FAQ: http://blog.surfmark.net/surfmark-help/
Try out and more info: http://www.surfmark.com/
(thanks to Ana Cristina Pratas for discovering this) Via Robin Good, Beth Kanter 
“A participatory documentary tells a story about a community using the community’s own words. That story is disseminated back to that community via social media.” (Weight, 4:2011)
*** Now available free, it is a textbook for creating participatory documentaries using social media. Aimed at people who can take photos and engage with basic social media, it seeks to leverage the social web to create niche community-based documentaries. You will learn how to create a semi-professional project without spending any money on gear or software. The cookbook is available as a PDF download. An enhanced iPad version with video and audio content will shortly be available at the Apple iBookstore, also free. 
Organized locally by the Friends of the Corvallis-Benton County Public Library, Wednesday’s event lasted 15 minutes. Participants were asked to wear a yellow hat, to gather at the assigned location at the assigned time and to start reading. The idea was that when a passerby asked one of the yellow-hatted readers what was going on, the reader would hand their book to that person. Stefani McRae-Dickey walked up to a complete stranger downtown and handed her a book. She assured the woman, Phyllis Witham, that the book — “The Kite Runner” by Khaled Hosseini — is excellent. ... Read more Via Luca Baptista |
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