Blogging and Browsers

Matthew Allen made an interesting point about browsers. Looting Matters has been collecting this information and IE is still in the lead followed by Firefox with Safari and Chrome quite a way behind. I have noticed that more people are using phones to access information and iPads (from several locations) are quite often used.

Changing the Learning Lab

Since the formation of SALT the question has arisen as to what sort of web presence it should have. A static information site? A community driven site? Part of the main university site? How does this debate impact on the Learning Lab? Should all learning and teaching support be in one place? How do we make sure that we preserve our "treasure trove of goodies?"

Here in Learning Lab Towers we've been exploring whether we can export the Learning Lab into Joomla and Wordpress in order to preserve the content but also allow the community to be maintained and to flourish. Having played around with both, using a nifty little tool called WAMP Server (thanks to Alex Roberts in LIS for this) it seems that we can for most of the site and the numerous Joomla plug-ins mean that we can expand the community driven nature of the site. We can also improve the navigation and give the site a more cohesive look and feel. The only downside is that we can't find a decent wiki for Joomla. We could stick with PBWorks or maybe Mediawiki using university accounts? Or perhaps something else?

So the plan is to create a SALT site with all the learning and teaching resources in Joomla, Wordpress and a wiki whilst preserving the content and philosophy of the Learning Lab. What do you think?

Reflecting on Research Blog Readership

I thought it would be interesting to see how many people use RSS subscriptions for blogs in my research area. This means that my research blog (Looting Matters) has a solid core of readers in addition to those who visit it via the web or have the posts emailed to them. (This blog, Swansea Learning Lab, has a grand total of 7 subscribers.)

I wonder if this gives a better idea of readership than straight "hits". The blog receives on average well over 10,000 visits a month (some just going to the home page). But the RSS subscription figures via Google Reader would suggest that some 7000 posts were delivered to electronic desktops (including the iPad).

Video blogging

Christopher Ming Ryan writes about how to use video blogs (v-blogs): "4 Mistakes Video Bloggers Make and How You Can Avoid Them".

Jon Stewart shakes his fist at Twitter

“It’s no wonder young people love it, according to reports about young people by middle-aged people.”

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

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