SIMPLES! All you need to do is become a student and sign up to social networking site Studyvox.co.uk.

As the lovely lady is the site patron you too could wind up having a cheque or a music award passed into your sweaty grasp – it happened to me; it could happen to you.

This time around there were 3 things each of the winners of the inaugural bursary awards had in common:

1. we were all students
2. we were all female
3. we all thought this was some kind of a hoax or scam.

I kid you not, I mean; C’mon! Kylie Minogue handing out cash for nothing more than signing up to a social networking site?

It sounded insane! So much so that Stef and I even organised a house sitter ‘just in case’ while we travelled down to the event..  *blushes* paranoid much?

It’s taken me a while to recover from the exertion of travelling and being sociable which is why the date of the cheque is 25th of February but this blog post is happening in March – the joys of living with ME/CFS I’m afraid ( but this was an event that was definitely worth the health fall-out!)

Both Stef and I have been converted to the view of the studyvoxfoundation crew, we really want them to make of the studyvox.co.uk site everything they dream of. The people behind the charity are wonderful, caring passionate people not lacking in intelligence and their ideas are ambitious; they want to take on every big social networking site out there and as Kev the CEO put it “we want to take everything they’ve got horribly wrong and do it RIGHT!”

They want to create an online home for students, a place where;

• their profiles will not be held up out of context during a job interview as evidence of lying and debauchery
• they have representation and help with social needs (things supposedly catered for by the NUS)
• where they can talk freely about their courses and the towns in which they live
• a marketplace for them to sell anything from textbooks to clothes and furniture
• a one-stop shop for all their financial needs and concerns
• somewhere safe to upload their music, imagery and video footage

In short they are taking on Facebook, myspace, MP3unsigned, Youtube, directgov and any other site you can think of that can hold some kind of benefit to students.

It’s audacious, it’s ambitious, it’s totally nuts – but they are so passionate about their vision that you cannot help but be swept along by it.

The bursary awards are to be a regular thing, any student who signs up to StudyVox is in with a chance of winning – it’s definitely on the up and up, it’s legit and I have the pictures to prove it. If you don’t believe me then just look at some of the news coverage of the event on the BBC and in the Telegraph and obviously the foundations own news site the StudyVox echo (I have several times just to remind myself that I didn’t dream the whole thing)

They want to ‘put their money where their mouths are’ and show in a real way that they are there to help support the student community.

At present I will admit to a lot of teething problems with the social networking website – but that is less down to the vision of the group and more to do with the company paid to do the coding and design; I think, given time and a lot of tweaking this site could well be a force to contend with, the NUS would be well advised to take note and learn a few things.

Explaining ME/CFS to ‘normal’ people is difficult because there is no frame of reference, you can try the usual

• ‘imagine you have a hangover combined with flu’
• ‘imagine you just got run over but had no visible injuries and were expected to just pick yourself up and push through it’

Those kind of scenarios are not a good explanation.

How many people get drunk enough to have a hangover if they are already suffering from the flu? and who really knows what it’s like to be run over unless it has actually happened to them?

Normal people will never understand unless they get it themselves.

A geek on the other hand will instantly understand if you tell them that the human body is a laptop and when it gets ME/CFS that it may have contracted an invisible worm or virus that has changed a couple of registry keys and moved a few system files.

Now things don’t work the way they once did, programs crash for no apparent reason, it runs hotter when there’s no program on the go and everything is just so much slower and harder than it was before – it looks fine, all the virus and adware scans have come up empty but you know there is something wrong.

Even the battery fails to charge, it only ever makes it to around 10% even changing the cable or the way you use it has no affect on the constantly annoying pop up saying ‘please switch to mains’ – some days it doesn’t even start up at all even though the power light blinks at you to show there is life in there somewhere.

..but the casing still looks brand new and you’d never know there was a problem if you hadn’t used it previously – you’d just think it was a crap laptop.

So how do we fix this?

Sadly we don’t. Humans don’t get a re-boot or a re-install, we can’t save our memory to a backup system and when things start breaking down completely we can’t mend it with a new one (well, mostly)

We are stuck with this computer for life; We can uninstall a few social apps and conserve energy by shutting down the least essential processes, but basically that’s it.

Sucks to be ME huh?

But I’m not. I’m on my blog writing whatever pours forth – because I can.

I know all the theory on what I’m ’supposed’ to be writing (and how) but to be honest, I don’t think I care any more.
Copyblogger is one of my favourite reads and I’ve soaked up a great deal of knowledge from his generous offerings but I’m not a marketer and I’m not a product – not yet anyway.

Until my course is over and I’m in the job market I really am just rosevibe here and I once had a fair few blog friends who came around to visit purely because I was me and not some one-dimensional tweeter.
I miss that, a lot.

Over the last 2-3 years I’ve amassed quite a bit of knowledge about the web, social media, writing, conversation, e-learning, project managing, marketing, programming and jewellery making, but because I’m aware of how much I still need to learn to be as good as I want to be I never seem to find the time to put any of it into practice (coursework excepted that is) and it’s been remarked on by a few of my twitter friends (*cough* @PhilWoodMusic, @crashbox *cough*) that I talk about things but never seem to share my work..

A link tweeted by the aforementioned copyblogger for a post by Rajesh Setty explains my lack of sharing better than I could – even if saying so assumes that I think of myself as smart.

(..and we all know by now that I don’t, if I was it wouldn’t be taking me so long to figure out how xml, xslt, wsdl, soap etc work! never mind installing php on my laptop.. still haven’t done that *shame*)

I have so many ideas and half-formed projects in my mind that I need to become immortal just to see half of them through – it frustrates the hell out of me that I don’t have the energy or health to get even one off the ground. All my energies are directed into my course and my family right now – perhaps if I didn’t have ME/CFS to contend with things would be different, but as it stands – I’ll be lucky to come away with the degree I want.

..but if I get less than a 2-1 I’ll be screaming the C-B words, muchly!

I get annoyed so easily these days – mainly by people who needlessly mock others; who take delight in the misfortune of folk in the limelight and seem to have lost any semblance of nobility, civility, honour and conscience.

I’m not a saint by any means; but constant finger pointing and mob rule alongside the ‘reality shows’ and our rotten society as a whole.. it sickens me and makes me want to grab the face of the self satisfied wanker behind it all and ram it full force through the nearest window into a rusty spike.

I know.. a tad graphic – but I can’t convey the depth of Grrrrrrr! and Arrgggggh! that I feel when looking at what the people of this country have turned into in the name of multi-culturalism and political correctness when things like that are condoned and in some circles elevated to the height of fashion, wit and branded entertainment.

Now the beloved is pointing at the clock and ordering me to bed so I guess it’s probably for the best if I leave this here before I get truly riled and kiss off any chance of sleep.

..But, even after the revamp – don’t expect this blog to fully reflect my knowledge and experience, its a personal space and so will more likely reflect my feelings and opinions with the odd sprinkling of ‘professionalism’. I’m not focussed enough on one area to create something professional for myself, I’ll leave the professional stuff at work where it belongs – or create a section of the site for it ;0)

G’night all – if you love me, do me a favour and tell me something wonderful about the world, after the tv viewing and general crapness of our world on the surface, I could do with a glint of glory about this year to carry into the next.

love y’all

Vics Xx

There are still tickets left so if you can get into london, come down and either show your support or heckle – either way, come down *grin* there are some cracking folks going with a wealth of experience happy to give advice or insight into whatever may be troubling you (on the tech/ internet/ social media front that it)

So.. My session:

’social media in higher education’

Sounds fairly broad doesn’t it?
Basically you’ll be taking a look at my experiences both with the CABLE project and (time permitting) my current role as student proctor.

(sounds awful doesn’t it – that’s the official title payroll have given me for the work I’ve done recently offering advice and guidance on using Studynet [The UH virtual learning environment] for e-assessment and group work purposes)

So to help ward off some possible misconceptions, here’s a little background to the project and a taster as to the type of thing I’ll be discussing.

The aim of the Continuing Education Partnerships (CEP) CABLE group project:

Hertfordshire virtual college rich picture

Create a Hertfordshire Virtual College:

• A virtual community of staff and students
• Overcomes the geographical remoteness of the colleges
• Responds to issues of management and coordination across institutional boundaries
• Builds on the existing evolving cooperative framework

The Hertfordshire HE consortium comprises four HE Colleges across Hertfordshire

• Consortium coordinated by the university of Hertfordshire (UH)
• Colleges are geographically remote from each other and from UH
• UH campus is venue for large number of centralised meetings
• Raises issues of staff and student communication and time commitment

The vehicle chosen for the virtual learning community was the HCI module taught to the FDsc IT Business pathway groups:

• Module delivered in mixed mode day and evening classes
• all 4 colleges during the second semester of their final year.
• 100 students both full time and part time across all four colleges

The idea:

• Have 4 virtual groups led by a student from each of the consortium colleges
• Give them 3 tasks to encourage co-operative and collaborative learning
• keep staff participation to a minimum; the project was to be student led as much as possible
• make inclusion to the project voluntary, this was to be a supplement to the module not an integral part.

As well as running studynet group one, I was the student steering group leader which meant I was the main point of contact for the project leader (Dominic Bygate) and other staff involved.

A summation of the interaction between students in my group:

• 14 student members representing 3 colleges
• 14 discussions included introductions and greetings, the proposed group tasks, football, HCI and programming with one discussion centred around the course in general; specifically favourite modules.
• 5 polls were used, only 2 of which were centred on the cable project tasks – the others were focussed on specific modules and the university progression event which linked into the discussions.
• The blog was found to be a useful way of disseminating information and prompting discussion – but folks had to be informed of a new blog post via the studynet news/ facebook/ personal email.
• When it came to the proposed task of sharing questionnaires (part of the official HCI assignment not the original group task) people moved away from studynet to personal email as it was not an intuitive process to upload files to the groups whereas attaching to email is a simple known method of file sharing.

I plan to give a quick run down on what we did, how we did it, what social media tools we used (and why) and my personal evaluation as to what we could do to make similar projects even better.

..If there’s time I’ll then talk about the use of the uh studynet environment for group work and e-assessment.

Most folks are aware of the GTD method created by David Allen and coming up fast behind in the awareness stakes is the Pomodoro technique created by Francesco Cirillo.

Both try to offer guidance in the most effective way of completing tasks and making the best use of your time, however the problem with a ‘one-size fits all’ philosophy is that the one-size never fits quite right for anybody.

The main problem with these methods and techniques is that you spend time trying to find the right combination of hints and tips that work for you when if you just carried on working instead of worrying about HOW you’re working, the jobs would get done anyway.

Where information is concerned the real winner between effective time use philosophies and the real time web will always be the web.

I’ve tried list making – but human rationalisation kicks in when I’m ‘not in the mood’ to complete the next task, procrastination kicks in during research when during the course of the task I follow a set of links to something interesting yet unrelated  to the subject being researched.. Habits are called habits for a reason.

With the wealth of information available on-line it is next to impossible to focus unless you have a very narrow band of interests and few people can claim this; even within one subject area there are multiple sub-topics to keep up to date with.

The real time web is not GTD friendly; it slaps you in the face with the fear of being left behind if you don’t read every interesting and relevant link sent your way. Twitter is definitely the worst culprit as, if you don’t click on a link as soon as you see it, the stream will carry it away and you have missed out on an opportunity to maybe learn something useful. Then there are the numerous unread feeds in your reader that throw silent accusations at you every time you log in, you add the things you don’t have time to read to bookmarking sites, subscribe to RSS in the hope you can catch up..

It will never happen; the real time web holds too much and it goes by too swiftly for a human to digest. It turns you into a receiver instead of a creator as you struggle to stay afloat in the tidal wave of information headed your way.

To counteract this, aspects of the pomodoro technique may be a little more helpful for folks like me who struggle to stay ‘on task’ and feel the need to play catch up all the time.

The focus booster timer is an effective way of making sure you take regular breaks and if you are a freelancer will also help you to account for the increments of time spent working on a project. That 5 minute break as you walk away from the computer means you can digest what you’ve been reading and look back over the task you are supposed to be doing; it helps you to re-focus and possibly even have a eureka moment as you mentally reorder the last few hours.

This is the most creative I’ve been on here for a while, and yet still I’m talking about old news; the words ‘practice what you preach’ have never been more apt..

Just think back over your last few weeks, have you created anything you can truly call your own? Or have you amalgamated, digested and regurgitated a number of interesting things from the web? Regurgitation is not necessarily bad; people like things to be presented in different ways after all – but how creative is it?