What is it used for?
The question and answer service JISC Answers is a great way to get information from people you trust. Once you have registered, you can find an answer, search to see if somebody has provided you with whatever you need, or ask a question yourself to the JISC community. Of course you can always give an answer yourself and share your expertise with others!
Members who are experts are marked as such on their reply. Questions and answers are moderated to keep them relevant. You can be alerted via email or by subscription to the questions’ RSS feed of any changes made to the JISC Answers page, so that you are always up to date.
Bookmarking
What is bookmarking used for?
There are a large number of bookmarking tools available on the Web. One of these is called 'Delicious'. It has been created to help you store, manage and share lists of URL bookmarks. It allows you access to all of your bookmarks from any computer with an internet connection. It works by users associating short names (also known as tags) with URLs. Each time a new bookmark is saved the user has the option to add 'tags' to the bookmark. Tags are essentially keywords that you and others can use to find these bookmarks in the future. All useful project management information tagged with jiscpm by you and others can be easily found in one place.
How does bookmarking work?
Once you have set up your Delicious account you can start adding bookmarks to sites with interesting and relevant content yourself. You can manually create a bookmark by clicking on "Save a new bookmark," on the top right hand corner of every page. Once you save a bookmark, you can edit it, give it informative notes, and add the tag jiscpm.
When you save a bookmark, you have the option of sharing it publicly. If you find a great article or blog post associated with project management, bookmark it with jiscpm. Anyone else searching Delicious can view the same link. Additionally, if you post a bookmark, other members can add that link to their set of bookmarks too.
RSS is also available on the Delicious site, so that your list of bookmarks becomes a useful way to communicate. When you come across an article or website that you think other project managers should read, bookmark it using Delicious, add the jiscpm tag, and the new URL will appear in their RSS reader. Likewise, if you have an RSS feed set up, you can tell whenever something has been bookmarked with jiscpm by someone else.
What are the benefits of using bookmarking?
Bookmarking gives you the tools to create a shared web directory for a specific topic. For example, if you're looking for information on project management, instead of using a search engine such as Google, you can access a high- quality list of URLs that have already been vetted by others. This allows you to share other people’s insights and knowledge and it’s a great way to communicate. When you subscribe to the jiscpm list’s web feed, you will be notified when new bookmarks are tagged by other users.
Blogs
What are blogs used for?
Another way of sharing and disseminating knowledge about project management within the JISC community is writing blogs and tagging your blog post with jiscpm. If you assign a tag to your posts the community will be able to identify relevant content. Useful blog posts can then be found in search engines and other users will be notified when new content associated with the tag has been added.
How do blogs work?
Most blog systems allow authors to add free-form tags to a post, along with placing the post into categories. For example, a post may display that it has been tagged with jiscpm. This is usually a web link leading to an index page listing all other posts filed under that tag. The blog often has a sidebar listing all the tags in use on that blog, with each tag leading to an index page. The author and reader of the blog can tag relevant content with jiscpm.
What are the benefits of using blogs?
By using the jiscpm tag the JISC community can identify all blog posts discussing project management. If you look for this tag in search engines such as technorati you can then see what others have contributed in this area even if you do not usually follow their blogs. It is the perfect way to collate relevant content. Tagging blog posts with jiscpm also enables subject-specific RSS feeds from the blog. It is therefore easy to stay informed about all posts with the topic project management. In this way the tag jiscpm can be used to open channels of communication between project managers that might not otherwise exist. It allows you to discuss common problems, answer each other’s questions and strengthen the community.
Twitter
What would it be used for
The micro-blogging service Twitter can be another useful tool for swapping ideas and networking with other project managers. It is designed to send short messages, similar to SMS on a mobile phone, but allows you to communicate with a huge number of people instead of just one or a few. Tweets (posts on Twitter) are visible to anybody but are more likely to be read by the sender’s followers. Following someone on Twitter means you are subscribing to their tweets, and their updates will appear in your personal timeline on your Twitter homepage.
How would it be used?
Other people or institutions on Twitter can be addressed by prefacing their username with a @ symbol, e.g. @jisc. The tweet will then be sent to the named recipient, but will still show up on your list of tweets.
A tag can be added at any point to a message by putting the # symbol in front of it e.g. #jiscpm. Tags are very important in Twitter as they allow you to see all the people talking about a certain topic. By using the hashtag jiscpm tweets that relate to the project management topic can be identified. If you search for this tag you can see what others have contributed to this topic even if you don’t usually follow them.
What are the benefits of using Twitter?
Messages on Twitter can be a good dissemination channel for short, frequent information streams that are relevant to the area. Alternatively, you can share something you have learnt. Micro-blogging is often informal and flexible and can provide an ideal platform for rapid communication of ideas to others.
How do I bring it all together?
Creating your own dashboard with RSS feeds
You don’t need to keep visiting all of the networking sites to have an overview of what’s going on in the JISC PM community. Providing the sites you use have an RSS feed, you can create and customise your own dashboard.
RSS is a format for delivering regularly changing web content and most sites syndicate their content as something called RSS feed which you can subscribe to. RSS feeds are a bit like WebPages but designed to be read by computers.
To do this you need a feed reader, which is a piece of software that checks RSS web feeds and automatically updates when new content is added. The feed reader allows you to subscribe to RSS feeds described with a specific tag creating a link between the site and your reader. It therefore puts all content tagged with jiscpm in one single place providing a simple and time efficient way to track new content.
There are different types of RSS readers. The simplest way is a news reader which you access through your web browser. It usually organizes feeds you have subscribed to in the ‘favorites’ bar. Another option is online readers such as Google Reader, Bloglines or Netvibes. They collect content from various feeds, collate it, and organize it as a webpage which is easy to navigate. Alternatively, you can use news reader applications that can be downloaded and installed on your computer. Examples are Google Reader, FeedDemon or FeedReader. Microsoft outlook can also be used to subscribe to rss feeds.
In order to subscribe to RSS feeds look out for the orange RSS button. If you click on it you can subscribe to the feed in various ways. You can drag the URL of the feed into your news reader or cut and paste the URL into a new feed in your news reader.
JISC PM Netvibes Page