Reading Stephen Downes’ article today on Connective Knowledge I was struck by how strongly the following outline describing the distribution of knowledge across a network of connections reminded me of social proof: Summary: Connective knowledge is both: – knowledge OF networks in the world – knowledge obtained BY networks As I outlined earlier, Social Proof [...]
Category Archives: Audience
Persona Analysis of IR Users
15-Sep-08There’s a very good persona analysis in the latest edition of D-Lib called “Using Personas to Understand the Needs and Goals of Institutional Repository Users” out of the U. Colorado Boulder. A couple things caught my eye. Firstly, the persona study came across findings they didn’t expect, which is a classic result for user-centered research: [...]
An experiment in MOOC
09-Sep-08I signed up for the 10 week Connectivism MOOC starting this week. If you thought an undergrad class with 200 students was bad, try getting your bearings among 1,600 other students. I’ll be curious how this thing goes, and evolves, but I’m mostly interested in the topic. More details here.
Ithaka has released an interesting study it has been working with since 2000 on academic libraries and faculty perceptions. What I like most from this is a useful model of academic library services that they’ve broken into three aspects: purchaser, archive, and gateway. They describe these as: The purchaser role was described in the survey [...]
Clay Shirky Web 2.0 speech – updated
28-Apr-08A quick bookmark post on Clay Shirky’s Web 2.0 speech from last week. It’s a great read in its entirety. Here are my favorite sections: So I tell [a television producer] all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. [...]
Very good persona analysis [pdf] coming out of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia. The thing I like best, aside from the nice personas they’ve developed, is the way they’ve mapped them against experience/seriousness vs. frequency of use/need for the library: This fits in nicely with several assumptions I’ve had regarding the audience we serve at [...]
Over the weekend, On The Media had an interesting interview with Clay Shirky where he talked about the potential dark side of unmediated communication for his new book: Here Comes Everybody He’s saying that our conception of the “audience” is moving away from a simple media consumer towards that of an actor with real power. [...]