Heidi Allen Digital Strategy

Imagine you are researching a particular topic.  How can you tap into what others are researching on the same topic? How can you keep in touch with what your peers are talking/bookmarking/looking at? How can you do that easily, regularly, w good search facilities?
I (@dreamingspires) decided to ask the question on Twitter which resulted in a 3 way discussion:
Discussion 22nd April on Twitter:
@dreamingspires: How can you keep in touch with what your peers are talking/bookmarking/looking at? How can you do that easily, regularly, w good search …

@AllergyNotes: ‘How can you keep in touch with what your peers are talking/bookmarking/looking [...] Continue Reading…

Following certain steps when using twitter can yield high quality uptodate information on topics relevant to you.  Following on from my How To Use Twitter for Research Video, these are some of the steps I take.
Step 1 Find The Right People To Add To Your Network

The most useful people to add are those who post links and information regularly on topics that interest you
Take the top 5-10 people you find the most useful of the people you follow and look at the profiles of the people they follow and add them to your network
Look at the profile [...] Continue Reading…

Attending a conference with Nic Lucas (@Webutaries) resulted in an impromptu video interview on how I use Twitter for research.

“How do you trust what you’re reading is quality?”  “When does quality become quality?” These are recurring themes encountered with regard to some of the websites that offer free content. However, aggregator sites gather content of a certain standard or type which may offer an alternative to some of the more traditional ways of peer review or defining quality.
Academic Earth

This is an excellent new educational resource which gathers video lectures from leading Universities such as MIT, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.  Lectures are free to use and download and there is plan to include social features for users.  [...] Continue Reading…

Changes to the way content is sourced and paid for has led me to search for new startups and business models, some of which I will list over the next few weeks.
Connexions
Connexions allows educational materials to be organized in small modules that can that can be be linked and arranged in different ways according to how the user wants to learn.  They currently have over 9000 modules woven into almost 500 collections. All content is free to use under the Creative Commons ‘attribution’ license.

Collaboration is encouraged – creators of new content are listed as authors, who can assign others [...] Continue Reading…

Medialoper published an excellent article written by Kirk Biglione “Traditional Publishers Crash (and Burn at) SXSW”

It has made me so cross I have changed my blog theme to Red for the duration until I simmer down. Kirk is right in everything he writes – what a wasted opportunity.

To the panel: Well done for displaying your profound love of books. Right. We love books. Yes we’ve got that. We all do. Even those of us who don’t love books. Now what? There is so much to talk about, so many new things [...] Continue Reading…