Blogs as a measure of quality

An interesting talk I attended treated the use of blogs as an instrument of determining the quality of a public service. This is particularly significant where quality assessment is habitually performed as part of a learning process.

As a public agency, we are not only interested in what the assessment forms tell us. Most of the information is quantitative and does tell us something about the general level of our training. We do not, however, know what we might do more than we do. For this purpose, qualitative analysis may be a good alternative. And to do this with limited resources, blog analysis could be a good tool.

In blog analysis, (semi-)automatic tools are used to check blogs about educational activities. We can determine what exactly they can contribute to continuous improvement of the course quality.

Ideally this could be an automatic process. Among the thousands of blog entries about the Syntra Network, many are probably not useful for this purpose. But equally likely, many are. We can learn from the many blog and comment entries about school teachers to improve our quality, not on the individual level (eg. of the teacher) but on the course level. In general, any shortcomings of teachers are pretty quickly signaled to co-ordinators and remedied.

For the government level, course quality could be better monitored with the blog analysis method to enhance the existing quality monitoring systems. It is a suggestion for any education provider to take to heart.

Educa Online 2008 is over

The bar offered some interesting conversation to conclude another very interesting Educa. I will try to post some more about the things I've seen and learned in the next days and on monday, my teacher meeting will no doubt be very interesting indeed.

Educa Online 2008

Continuing my effort of last year, I'll try to share some insights gained while attending Educa Online 2008. Since the online method is a complex one, I will post mindmaps to go with the written posts.

As courtesy to some of my colleagues and friends - who specifically asked me to do this - I'll try to finalize the mindmaps a bit faster than normal. Your thanks is much aeppreciated.

I'll try to post on as many topics as possible. And they're off!

Wiki's about mass and me being part of it.

A couple of days ago, I was talking about wikis and we all agreed that they are wonderful. And so they are. I use wiki a lot, find much on it in different languages and I find the quality generally excellent.

So I contribute regularly to wikis, don't I? Well, no. It seems I haven't yet found the wiki that arouses my curiosity enough to want to contribute to it. I've been thinking about organizing a wiki for our extranet, but I find it hard to think of things to write about.

I realized that everything I want to find already exists. Of course, I am a regular contributor to several knowledge databases. Some of the subjects I write about are boats and sailing , general politics etc. But I rarely add knowledge to wiki-style environments. So why don't I? Not because I have nothing to tell, surely. It's due to me not having an interest in contributing to a knowledge base available to the outside world.

I'm not saying I'm not interested in sharing. It's just that I haven't found that one topic in which I am specialized enough to write about. Often we need an external incentive to persuade us to invest time in something. So if someone can provide me with an external stimulus to share what I know, I'd be happy to comply to this and tell you what I know.

Now only to find those interested in my knowledge to convince me. And then I still have to find the time to do this on top of all my other activities. Isn't everybody constantly weighing time and interests?

This is why web 2.0 will only keep working when enough of us often enough decide in favor of spending time on this mutual project to keep it going. This mass of people can never be wrong - in the long run.

Back to school

As I was preparing my talk on portals, one of the messages I wanted to bring across turned out to be this: All the above 30's had to learn how to write. All over again. My first writing experience was over thirty years ago. My second round of learning to write was about ten years ago, when I started writing articles.

And now, it's the third time. I've resisted long and hard. My website (all four versions of it) is still written old style. I still work a lot of my time on documents that I write alone and then distribute for discussion.

So I have to start writing 2.0 style. Short bursts, open documents with room for input. Collaboration is key, and I'm still learning how to do it in my own workspace.

So how do others make this transition? Now that's what I want to know.