Web Literacy: How Good Are You at Recognizing Fake Web Sites and Email Scams?

In a public service to Bamboo Project readers, via Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration, comes this 10-question McAfee quiz. Can you tell the fake websites from the real ones? What about the scams? Like Amit, I was a Tightrope Walker, scoring 7 out of 10, which according to McAfee suggests that I should be a little more careful in my web habits. This also means that I'm planning to download... Read more →


Serializing Your Content With FeedCycle

I was checking out the Open Learn project this morning (a topic worthy of its own blog post) and came across their competition to remix/reuse their content, which led me to an interesting little tool--Feedcycle. Feedcycle enables you to publish serialized RSS feeds. In other words, subscribers can sign up to receive a series of blog posts, podcasts, videocasts, etc. automatically delivered daily. As subscribers sign up, they will be... Read more →


Building a Better Conference

In the education/learning parts of the blogosphere, there's been a lot of talk lately about professional conferences and how to increase their value. I want to follow this trail because it led me to some thoughts of my own. Tony Karrer started things going by asking what we could do to make conferences better. He made several suggestions, including: "Expert Only" time Unconference within a conference Better fun activities "Passionate... Read more →


Empowering the Change Agents--Consciousness & The 10% Solution

It's interesting the difference a day makes. Yesterday I expressed my frustration over my inability to change people who are meant to be change agents. Writing it down got most of the negative energy I was feeling out of my system. It also left me some space to think a little more about the problem. And another reason to be grateful for blogging--writing about it brought me some good advice... Read more →


Link Love

I'm on my way out the door to a conference and have a bunch of things in my "blog this" file that I wanted to clear out. So today is Link Love Day. I'd suggest a quick scroll through the topics to see if anything catches your fancy as these are really random. On Management The Cranky Middle Manager has a new podcast on managing 4 generations at work. Good... Read more →


How to Be A Beginner

Part of learning and growing, I think, is getting comfortable with being a beginner. Realistically, as quickly as things change anymore, we're always a beginner at something. As soon as we think we've mastered one thing, there will be five more skills we need to learn just to keep up. If we aren't able to accept this, we'll be in big trouble. I've been thinking about this a lot today.... Read more →


New Report from Pew Says that Half of Americans Are Only Occasional Users of Modern ICT

Via Neville Hobson, highlights from a new report from the Pew Charitable Trust, "A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users": 8% of Americans are deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications Another 23% are heavy, pragmatic tech adopters – they use gadgets to keep up with social networks or be productive at work. 10% rely on mobile devices for voice, texting, or entertainment 10% use information gadgets,... Read more →


The Psychology of Email--Two Studies

A couple of interesting studies re: email use and our responses to it, via Jeremy Dean of PsyBlog. The Impact of Capitalization and Emoticons on Perceptions of Email Apparently, depending on your personality type, proper use of capitalization and the use of the smiley emoticon can make you seem more likable. According to one study cited by Dean (Byron and Baldridge, 2007): They found that, sure enough, using correct capitalisation... Read more →


Robin Good on Educating the "Net Generation"

Robin Good has another great article today on Educating the Net Generation. Ironic, given my previous post on the digital divide. I completely agree that many in this new generation of kids are a different breed, with different approaches to learning and that schools need to learn to adapt their teaching protocols accordingly. But I also think that characterizing all learners as being this net savvy obscures the very real... Read more →


Please Don't Tell Me That You Haven't Been Taught to Manage

A common complaint I hear from supervisors is that they haven't been "taught" to manage. The assumption, here, is that if the organization hasn't sent you to a training, how could you possibly be expected to know how to be a good manager? My personal feeling? That's a cop-out, especially in the age of so many free online tools and resources. So here are a few you can use to... Read more →