Lesley Anderson

Meeting 1

As the date for our pod assignment was getting closer and we seemed to have little success facilitating meetings RedPod decided to meet on Friday 2/10/09 at about 8.30 pm using Skype as a meeting network.  We decided to use Skype as we had been chatting on it and found it a successful way to talk to each other. That time was chosen because one of our members - Liz Evans lives in Darwin N.T. and we needed to take into account the time difference.

The decision to meet was made by three of the pod members - myself, Liz and Melenna as we chatted on Skype the night before. We all felt we needed to make a start on our assessment and my thoughts were to try and get it up and running before my school holidays finished.

The pod has 2 other members - Ben, who was unavailable to attend and Shin for whom we had no contact details as this member didn’t appear to be using the forum and had not attended any previous attempts to meet.  We did post a message to the subject forum, just in case either of the other members were available.

During our meeting we did make some decisions about how we would address the assessment.
We decided to create a new blog purely for RedPod and use it to write our ideas and recommendations for the final assessment. This blog would become our group’s collaborative space and we would have all our research and information in one place.
We also decided to post reflections on the assessment, and logs of the meetings to our personal blogs.

We made these decisions knowing that other members of the pod needed to be informed and contacted - Liz volunteered to do this and I volunteered to create our new blog using WordPress.
http://redpod.wordpress.com

Our group also decided to take a social network each to begin researching in order to make a start on our assessment and meet again on Wednesday 7/10/09 at about 8.00pm for first discussions.
I created our blog and customised it a little to be suitable for the pod and I also created some categories to get us started.

Here we go…………

Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1. Summarise the use of

• 1. Wiki drafts of papers for public discussion and
• 2. Twitter in Government.

Wikis appear to be a favoured way of creating some documents where public discussion is to be included. On the Public Sphere2  site. http://wiki.katelundy.com.au/PublicSphere2 an outline is given of the steps that were undertaken to create a collaborative document on - Government 2.0: Policy and Practice - which would ultimately be given to the Gov2.0 taskforce when it was completed.  Use of a wiki was central to this process, enabling people from throughout the Australian general public to have their say about the topic by adding to the wiki file.  This has also been the process for Public Sphere3 and other Government bodies are embracing the idea of public forum set up in this way with a view to decision making being collaborative with and transparent to the general public.

Twitter also seems to be gathering momentum for use in such forums. Both the Public Sphere reports mentioned above and passed on the Gov2.0 taskforce included documentation of twitter feeds in which members of the government and public added comments and information to the discussion taking place. On all the Gov2.0 sites are icons for twitter encouraging people to follow the government on it. Read the rest of this entry »

Using Facebook - Wednesday 9/09/09

Working together to get things done!

Ken sent an email on Tuesday 8/09/09 which included an invitation to join the ITC 510/ITC 213 Facebook site in preparation for an online collaboration with the group on Wednesday.  Unfortunately I was unable to get the links etc to work for me, so I was unable to join the group. 

For one of our earlier topics, there was mention of a 510/213 Facebook page and I had gone searching for it.  Unable to find it - it is fairly well hidden apparently, I created a page that was accessible to the group and used the picture here as our ID.

I am only new to Facebook, so I’m still getting my head around it. My older children have been using it for ages and much prefer it to other online pages such as MySpace.  I think it is a great, personal, quick and easy way to keep in contact, either by instant messaging/chat or leaving messages on someone’s “wall”. Read the rest of this entry »

Virtual Environments and Your Cognition

Using Facebook

I joined Facebook on 20^th July 2009.

Going to the Facebook site - www.facebook.com, filling in some basic details - Name, email address etc, I created a password and voila! I had a Facebook page. It was such an easy process to complete.  I found a couple of photos of myself to upload into my “profile photos”, filled in some personal info, such as the names of my husband and children and my page was definitely up and running.  Within a few hours I had requests from 4 people to become “friends”. It appears that being friends enables you to see the photos on another person’s Facebook page, write on their “wall” - a section of the page to leave messages etc and view their personal information.  24 hours later I had 7 friends that included family, past students and colleagues. I was intrigued to see the names that turned up with requests to be added. Read the rest of this entry »