Blogging Practices To Support Project Work
Brian Kelly facilitated a 1 hour-long workshop session on "Blogging Practices To Support Project Work" for an audience of about 60 people at the JISC Managing Research Data Programme 2011-12 launch event which was held at the National Leadership College, Nottingham on 1-2nd December 2011.
Abstract
Blogs can provide a simple and easy-to-use mechanisms for supporting a variety of project activities such as engaging with one's user communities; dissemination of work activities and providing reports to project managers and funders.
However since projects will have a fixed lifespan it is not necessarily easy to develop a user community. The development in recent years of a range of other collaborative and communications tools, such as social networks, and Twitter, is also making people question the value of blogs.
In this workshop session Brian Kelly will describe how project blogs can provide an open and transparent mechanism for supporting project activities. Brian will describe various examples of best practices for providing project blogs including agreeing and documenting the blog's purpose and the content providers; strategies for publishing appropriate content; ways of engaging readers with the content through integration with tools such as Twitter; ways of providing full content for processing by third party services; the strengths and weaknesses of tools for measuring the impact of blogs and approaches for managing blog content once a project is over.
The workshop session will provide an opportunity for group discussions and related activities. Possible group activities might include:
- Identifying the purpose(s) and target audiences of the blog.
- Ways of encouraging comments and reaching out to new audiences, beyond the 'echo chamber'.
- Finding your blogging 'voice.'
- Working with your blogging peers.
- Selecting your blogging platform.
- Understanding other tools which can support your blogging activities.
- Dealing with difficulties.
Expected Outcomes
At the end of the session participants should:
- Have a better appreciation of the different approaches which can be used to support project blogs.
- Be able to identify an appropriate strategy for their own project blog.
- Understand the different ways in which blog content may be used.
- Be aware of best practices for maintaining project blogs.
- Be aware of best practices for managing blogs once the project is complete.
Slides
- Blogging Practices To Support Project Work
- [MS PowerPoint format]
Note that the slides are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.