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August 23, 2005
Congrats to Alec Couros
Hats off to professor and fellow local blogger Alec Couros, author of Couros Blog - Frequent Rants from an Ed. Tech'er who I discovered was cited in Maclean's annual university guide as one of the favourite professors at the University of Regina.
Alec did a presentation on blogs, RSS and the like for the local IABC chapter that I attended a few months ago. We were able to use the resources of the university with its wireless environment and raft of Airport-enabled iBooks and it made for a hands-on and interactive session. It was certainly interesting to observe as many of the individuals who attended were hearing about these kinds of new technologies for the first time. Suffice to say, although I was quite familiar with the technology, I found the presentation both informative and enjoyable.
(While on Alec's blog prior to the session, I also read a copy of a presentation he did on cyber-bullying that was very, very interesting stuff).
Anyhow, that was the first chance that I had to meet Alex in person, having read his blog before attending. I'm sure his passion for the tools of the trade that I have no doubt he employs in his classroom is one of these reasons for his acknowledgement in the Macleans guide.
Congrats.
Posted by Derek Leverington at August 23, 2005 2:16 AM
Comments
Thanks for the kind words Derek, and for noticing. I'm glad the presentation was a success, but I would be interested to know how many of the attendees have actually moved on to blogging in some way or form. It's certainly not for everyone, but I certainly enjoy it. Put my love of such technologies with my love of teaching, and thus sharing such neat, disruptive technologies ... and you've got someone who hasn't worked a day he hasn't thoroughly enjoyed.
All the best in your blogging pursuits ... I'll be reading!
Posted by: Alec Couros at August 30, 2005 9:43 PM
I have a different background than most of the people that attended the session, so I'm not representative in an any way. That said, my impression was that to a lot of people there these kind of disruptive technologies are just that to them - disruptive. As such, they can be easily seen as another thing on the pile to have to manage in an already busy day.
I would guess that your presentation would have been the first time that many of people in the room actually played with the technology and heard about it beyond just hearing the acronyms.
I think you did a good job of introducing it and how it works. And even though I tend to get excited about these kinds and would love to see adoption on a steep curve, the reality is that it's going to take some time for these kinds of technologies to really change how things happen day to day.
So, the good news is that the average Regina IABC member has some time before they would be crippled in their career by not knowing about these kind of new technologies.
Having spent several years working in technology among communicators, I've observed a gradual but consistent learning curve. Fast forward 5 years, I doubt many will be blogging, but they'll know more than they do today.
I think at some point a follow-up session that centred on a couple of topics focussed on communicators would be a good idea. The agenda could include:
- use of RSS feeds on client sites
- use of blogs for internal communications
- how to use tools like PubSub & Blogpulse to monitoring what people are saying about you
- how younger audiences are using these kind of technologies in their communication and culture
Posted by: Derek Leverington at September 6, 2005 12:25 AM
Thanks for the reply. I think you're probably correct in observing such sessions as disruptive in the different sense. Blogging/RSS is certainly not for everyone, even with many more adopters, it's not necessarily adopted everywhere by everyone.
The follow-up session sounds great. You know where to find me.
Cheers.
Posted by: Alec Couros at September 12, 2005 8:31 PM
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