« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »
The Resource Alliance, a UK based organisation building fundraising capacity across the world, has just relaunched their website - it is significantly improved.
Check out their How to Guides, Recommended Reading etc. Useful stuff.
Now it'd be good if they'd get around to update 'The Worldwide Fundraiser's Handbook: A Resource Mobilisation Guide for NGOs and Community Organisations' which is due for a refresh as well.
Having fielded a few general e-queries from the Population and Sustainability Network who tracked me down thanks to in the old-fashioned off-the-web word-of-mouth way, specifically through the Wilderness Foundation - I got thinking about a string of past conversations with all sorts of people about the challenge of population growth. Hence I thought I'd share a couple of superb videos that I think are great conversation starters:
I first heard about Gapminder.org some years ago but lost the link and had actually been looking for it intermittently until I accidentally came across it recently (and how it has improved! - very impressed) when watching a whole stack of TED Talks. Now the above one has recently been complemented with this new one:
Now, I have put this one in the Collaboration category as it showcases how an open attitude to data and allowing even uninvited people to collaborate around it really can reap rewards in better understanding of big issues (even though our hero Rosling clearly faced an uphill task getting this far). Visual representation of statistics is key when communicating - as I have talked about previously in my entry about Risk. If you want even more population related video, then check out the United Nation's Population Fund Video Channel here: http://video.unfpa.org/. Also, check out Rosling's blog here: http://www.roslingsblogger.blogspot.com/
Ran a new version of my Web 2.0 workshop - this time specifically for a number of academics @ Universidade de São Paulo. It was a veritable rollercoaster - talking of the evolution of academic engagement: from Socrates to Plato through to Web 2.0.
One observation from the PhD closest to me was how many academics have forgotten that dense research papers were painstakingly typed and the corrected with Tipp-Ex until relatively recently (especially if you use a sliding scale that goes back to Plato and bear in mind that for the bulk of history everything was handwritten).
Yet, all academics now know manage to get on with the basic functions of a word processing package, whether Word or something else.
Still, despite this there is a clear resistance to the tsunami of change that is afoot due to Web 2.0 amongst many of the academics I speak to.
- And this is interesting as the communityset to benefit the most from these new technologies (and in many respects rightfully is at the very forefront of this) is the academic community who is able to collaborate to an extent never previously thought possible.
We talked about how distribution of citations is not even – 80% goes to just 38% of those contributing according to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi in Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means and also Mark Granovetter's The Strength of Weak Ties – namely the fact that you are more likely to be helped by those outside your immediate circle - This article, as a little side note, is a perfect example to show the power of Google Scholar - Here's the first two search results thrown up on the query 'strength of weak ties':
4666 citations! Guess Mr. Granovetter finds himself in the right end of the Pareto curve of citation distributions.
The Strength of Weak Ties - all 3 versions »
MS Granovetter - The American Journal of Sociology, 1973 - JSTOR
The Strength of Weak Ties. Mark S. Granovetter. ... 1362. The Strength of Weak Ties Rapoport
1963 ). This evidence is less comprehensive than one might hope. ...
Cited by 4666 - Related Articles - Web SearchThe Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited - all 7 versions »
M Granovetter - Sociological Theory, 1983 - JSTOR
The Strength of Weak Ties: A Network Theory Revisited. ... These. Strength of Weak Ties
themes are all taken up in greater detail, with supporting evidence, in SWT. ...
Cited by 767 - Related Articles - Web Search
The core point here was that whilst Google Scholar is a great way of finding finished articles (and realising how well cited or not so well cited articles are) there is so much else happening that affects the way academics operate.
Open and closed Wikis is just one example - Most academics I speak to agree that they have a professional responsibility when it comes to accuracy about things in their field. Hence my absolute encouragement on getting to know Wikis and how they work.
To get an understanding of the impact of the biggest Wiki of them all, we watched part of the TED Talks session with Jimmy Wales, founder of the Wikipedia Foundation talking about how it all works. Here's the full clip (highly recommended):
This led to lots of discussion about the reliability and accurary of Wikipedia - some participants, as alluded to above, said that they had found stuff about their field that was wrong. I hope they now feel confident to hit the 'Edit' button so they can simply correct it themselves...
One key recommended text is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything - but it is also worthwhile visiting other Wikis to get a feel for how this is used, for example the Encyclopedia of Earth - A free "fully searchable collection of articles written by scholars, professionals, educators, and experts who collaborate and review each other's work." - Great stuff and great resource.
Now Wikis are of course also incredibly useful in small collaborative setups - Wikispaces, an organisation with the motto 'Wikis for everyone' is giving away 100K spaces to the K-12 educational segment - 27K+ have been taken up so far. (Thanks to the indefatigable David Wilcox of Designing for Civil Society fame for pointing out this resource to me quite some time ago).
Clear to see that the students coming through the ranks and reaching university in due course will be well versed with technology - hence so much more pressure on academics to catch up now.
I look forward to seeing the seeds of e-growth planted blossom over the coming months and years. We'll probably have to run an intermediate workshop to follow-up - when we do that we'll also look at Open Educational Resources movement as well as getting a bit more hands-on with some of the challenges.
