Start Blogging Right Away

Blogging has become extremely popular during the last few years. A blog or web log is a mixture of diary and guide. It’s a good way to reflect on your thoughts, share ideas and learn. The use of blogs is a good way to support self-studying and distant learning.

Before you start blogging, visit the blogs of other people and discuss things with other bloggers. Try to create the main idea and features for your own blog. You can offer readers a personal diary, a report of your learning process or a list of links to interesting websites – or something completely different.

To be a good blogger, you have to write at least once or twice a week. Fresh material must arrive on a constant basis or the readers will vanish. The newest comments are listed first.

The Internet provides many free blog services where you can easily start your own web blog. You don’t have to install anything or buy any special software – just sign up and start writing.

Blog services

www.blogger.com
www.blogi.fi
www.edublogs.org
www.vuodatus.net

elearningtech.blogspot.com/
www.elearnspace.org/blog/
punya.educ.msu.edu/blog/
www2.mtroyal.ca/~nvaughan/

Wikis – Creating Open Content

The main goal of wiki communities is to create free, reliable, up-to-date dictionaries, encyclopedias and textbooks on the Web, together with other users. Wiki is an application that allows users to add and edit content freely on a website. All documents are written collectively.

Wiki projects offer an interesting opportunity for a learner to participate in a collective writing and knowledge building processes. It’s challenging to share your knowledge with other people and be part of an international online community. The Web works best as a collaborative medium.

Today, there are over a thousand public wiki communities. The English Wikipedia is the world’s largest and has over 2 700 000 articles, and Wiktionary (Wiki dictionary) has nearly 500 000 entries. There is also an active community working on the Finnish wiki encyclopaedia and dictionary.

Wiki projects

en.wikipedia.org
en.wiktionary.org
en.wikibooks.org
fi.wikipedia.org
fi.wiktionary.org
fi.wikibooks.org

Useful sources

edutechwiki.unige.ch/
www.wikieducator.org/WikiEdProfessional_eLearning_Guidebook                                                          http://education-2020.wikispaces.com/Connectivism

Emailing is effective when handling work-related correspondence, as long as you summarize the main issue in the title and the first few lines of the post. The be-all and end-all of an email is, however, in a cordial beginning and a gracious ending.

Email is a terrific channel for handling short and routine-like matters in the office. The fact is that in working life, the more directly the message answers the needs of the reader, the better the message functions. People should not be burdened with unnecessary posts: chain-letters and jokes should be forgotten altogether.

First Things First

The purpose of the message has to be made clear immediately. The most important part of the email is the subject field, i.e. the title. It has to be so specific that the reader will have no problems figuring out what the email is about. “Meeting” is not enough of a title, whereas “board meeting Mar 12 at 5.00 pm” gives all the information needed. The significance of the title is further emphasised when the email is read on a mobile phone: often the titles only are downloaded instead of the entire message – not to mention the attachments.

A good email message is written in accordance with the same guidelines as any other text. Any unnecessary repetition is weeded out, long expressions are made shorter, and the language is kept on a general level and as easy-to-understand as possible.

The most important parts of the email are the titles and beginnings of each paragraph. You are supposed to capture the interest of the reader in just a few key words – though the difficulty is in choosing the right ones.

Email and Emotions

A short message will easily become rude if it doesn’t open and close on a positive tone. Begin with thank you for your message, greetings from Lahti or, e.g., good morning and end with have a nice weekend, best wishes or regards.

The tone of the message is influenced by the chosen perspective too. If the message is dominated by the viewpoint of the writer’s organisation, the reader will feel like he has been passed by. The beginning The Board states that the notification — is approaching the issue from the perspective of the organisation, whereas it would be better to adopt the reader’s view point Your notification has been processed —

Shaping the Style of the Email

Unlike other documents, there is no standard layout for email: rather, the formatting of the message is decided by the software. Many users prefer the plain text setting, which means that the layout formatting is deleted completely.

It is always a good idea to add the sender’s contact information, which is easily done by using an automatic signature – all the better if everyone in the organisation uses the same standard format. You can have many different kinds of signatures for different purposes and it is easy to choose the suitable one by right-clicking the mouse in the text field.

Eyes On Security

It has become habitual to compare an email to a postcard – whatever you can write on a postcard can also be written in an email.

It is well worth it to pay special attention to forwarding messages and to the copies made from sent email. You are only allowed to forward other people’s messages if you are merely transferring them to the right official.

You should always be careful about opening email and attachments from an unknown sender. Internet crime has multiplied and become more intelligent. Fake messages are already profiled according to the receiver and he can be very believably deceived with information gathered from different sources. You should avoid sending attachments yourself, primarily utilising the text field. For example, briefings are better placed on the intranet than distributed as attachment files.

The text is a summary of the Hyvää palvelua sähköpostitse (Good Service by Email)-guideline, which has been published in its entirety in the Tampere city intranet. The longer article can also be found in Sanatori magazine 1/2009.

What Makes Your Message Interesting?

Production of Web materials can be illustrated with a triangle where the top is the idea, the middle contains the strategic choices and the bottom is the production process. The crucial idea is not often considered very consciously; instead, the project is started on the basis of old overhead slides, lecture notes and existing templates. However, time should be spent on the basic idea – as a matter of fact, the authors should arrange a brainstorming session for free exchange of implementation methods, authors and content, etc. Even if brainstorming does not change the basic arrangement, it will provide new ideas for implementation and sever the authors from established practices. An advantage of Web material authoring is that models are also sought from home pages, software and games. However, the text – or at least the way of writing – is easily migrated from existing sources.

Plan Your Strategy in Accordance with the Recipient

When planning the strategy, the recipient’s need for information and ability to receive it, as well the overall circumstances, must be taken into consideration. The material should therefore be re-adapted every time the target audience changes. In other words, the message should be focused so that it is significant from the recipient’s viewpoint and that the recipient is willing and able to understand it. The sender is responsible for getting the message through.

In recipient-oriented material

• Content has been selected in accordance with the reader’s needs
• New information is linked to earlier information and observations
• The style has been edited for intelligibility

What Is Most Important for the Recipient?

Well-focused communications are built out of a message and an outline. The author of any communications must always have a message – that is, something to say. Attention should be paid to both content and to the recipient’s needs in formulating the message: what is the most important thing for the recipient in the matter? What benefits and interests him/her the most? What can the message in practice really mean to him/her? The message is therefore not determined merely according to the inner logic of the subject but also in keeping with the recipient.

Useful content only is selected from the online texts by means of its essential message – in other words, its headings: texts are not generally read in order from beginning to end. The producers of materials should take this into account so that the materials also serve the browsing type of reading mode. The headings thereby play a key role, because they function as search words and as product descriptions for the text sections. The reader can quickly pick and choose the important points from a personal point of view from the textual flow on the basis of these captions. The reader should not be forced or taught to read online text in a different way, but of course you may always try to lure him/her to do so!

The message is expressed in the heading or, in other words, the ‘point’. This more often than not resolves whether or not the reader’s interest will be aroused. The reader must comprehend with one glance what the benefit and meaning of the matter is to him/her. One should devote enough time to fashioning headings, because the perusal value of a caption is five times greater than the rest of the text. The headings should be brief, interesting and informative: they give at best a total concept of the content and attract attention to the text itself.

The Material Must Have an Overall Outline

In network learning, the totality should be clearly discernible. A clear overall configuration and the predictability connected with the same also improve the usability of online learning. Paradoxically, the fascination of the material is nevertheless increased by a certain sense of the unexpected and multiplicity – in quite the same way as games. The unexpected should therefore be benefited from in the material in such a manner that the overall configuration is retained.

Manuscript Writing Is a Special Skill of Its Own

An online-material manuscript demands at least two rounds: a structural plan and a script which proceeds according to a screen display. Both should be worked on in an overlapping manner. The overall structure easily has a tendency in the learning material to observe a traditional linear style of progression, so that various structural alternatives should be looked at and conceptualized before the final selection. In online materials, what frequently works best is a combination of linear, hierarchical, rectangular or network-like structures.

Online text is modular in character: it is composed of many independent parts which must also be delivered as their own complete entities. Modular writing generally proceeds best if the content is measured out directly into online reference scripting advancing from one screen display to the next, and a traditional linear manuscript is forgotten entirely. Text modules on the net should be brief but meaningful: a good result is obtained when five pages are condensed into one, i.e., the text is packed according to the 1:5 principle. With this sort of packing ratio, it is normally only the repetition which is lost.

Readability, Popularisation and Style

The production of good online materials is a special skill in itself, which requires effort and creativity. The conversion of concepts and good ideas into viable website contributions is actually quite difficult – to say nothing about the acquisition of new modes of presentation. Aside from the work involved, the educator is obliged to face the truth in formulating online material: do I copy what’s old or do I try new things that require solutions demanding more work? Experimenting with fresh solutions not only takes the material but also one’s own development forward, even if it requires a little more time and effort before a new, frequently unrefined mode of presentation is honed into something publishable. The final strokes (coherence, appearance, readability, style, tone, correct language and punctuation) must be remembered no matter what, because web publications are often afflicted with ‘vanity press disease’ – as an entity, the text can give the impression of carelessness and amateurishness when there is no publishing editor to hone the final result.