Saturday, July 26, 2008

NW/MET is going 2.0

Hi everyone! Welcome to NW/MET's new blog space.

As NW/MET's current web team, Melany Budiman and I have been charged with evolving the organization's presence on the internet to use the 2.0 toolkit that is now available. A common theme this year emerged from discussions at the conference of our use of these tools and how we're communicating with them- we all appreciate the richness of a democratized discussion, and how the web does more to enable us to share our ideas with each other every day, and would like for more of that to enable communication amongst NW/MET members.

I'm a strong proponent for using these simple tools that can mesh with our daily routines, and hopefully not ask us to bear too much additional cognitive load. I've set up a NW/MET presence on the following sites, so that we have ways to share different kinds of communication media, using tools popular for their simplicity and ease:

  • Need wiki space? We've got a space on Wikispaces.com. Jim Blodget of Chemeketa Community College- a pioneer of our 2.0 world who started last year by beginning a wiki space for nw-met, so that's already set up. Thanks, Jim!
  • On YouTube.com, we're NWMET, and any kind of video that is related to the group can be posted there.
  • At Slideshare.net NWMET can post shared PowerPoint style presentations.
  • On Twitter.com, you can sign up for the NWMET tweet feed to receive micro blogged messages from the group.
  • On Ning.com, There are a host of community enabling tools available- which can include a way to help set up a conference support site quickly (One of the groups stated wants). We're NorthwestMET - come to Ning and join us!
  • Do you have a LinkedIn.com Profile? LinkedIn is a professional networking tool, and if you are a member of NWMET, you can sign up for our LinkedIn NWMET group to easily network with your peers.
  • Photos can be shared at our Picassa Web Album
  • We also have a group at groups.google.com. Why, with all the rest of this? Well, Ning is a great tool for communicating with groups, but sometimes you need for a distributed group discussion to be a little more private and safe. Google Groups offers great permissions settings for sharing conversations and media on the internet. Because of naming requirements, our Google Group is NorthwestMET.
Whew, what a list! The only thing we haven't covered yet is audio files- say, for podcasting or audio generated from presentations. These can either be placed up on YouTube, or we can submit them to iTunes or any other podcast directory, and store them on the nwmet.org server.

Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions- commenting on a blog post is great for that! It means everyone gets to share in the process, which is exactly what we're aiming for. Now that we have a foundation of tools, my next post will present our plan for how we'll use them! Stay tuned~

Monica Martinez-Gallagher
NWMET Co-Webmistress &
Instructional Multimedia Technologist
Portland Community College