Austenbook – Pride and Prejudice on Facebook

How Pride and Prejudice might have been acted out on Facebook! Thanks to Phil Bradley for the Tweet.

May 2008 snapshot of UK HE and FE developments in Second Life

I was alerted to this by the excellent Internet Resources Newsletter. The May 2008 snapshot of UK HE and FE developments in SL summarises an investigation into the use and uptake of Second Life (SL) by UK Higher and Further Education. The research, carried out in the period up until May 2008, had four main goals:

• to determine the “state of play” of SL developments within the Higher and Further Education sector,
• to discover how these developments are supported, in terms of time, funding and other resources,
• to explore the functionality of these developments, i.e. which types of media or interactive service they incorporate,
• to establish how “busy”, or well-used, the developments have been and discover any impacts resulting from their implementation and use.

Even if you do not work in higher or further education, this report is worth reading in order to get a feel for how it is being used, the pros and cons, and the positive and negative attitudes of people directly involved and those on the sidelines.

Tag clouds for analysing documents

[Originally posted on Karen Blakeman’s Blog]

CV not getting you those all important interviews? Nobody answering your job advert? Or perhaps your corporate publicity is not doing the biz? Processing your document through a tag cloud generator might give you a clue as to where you are going wrong. Sue Hill gave a presentation at the recent City Information Group open day on CPD and skills. In passing she mentioned that they sometimes run a CV or job description through a tag cloud generator to show people why their lovingly created prose is way off the mark.  The tag cloud  brings to the fore your most used terms and it can be a shock to discover that you have placed the emphasis in totally the wrong area. It then struck me that you could do this with any form of literature – a web page, training publicity, membership recruitment forms.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of tag cloud generators on the Web and most of them are free. For starters try Wordle, Tagcrowd, or Tag Cloud Generator. The example below is a tag cloud of the UKeiG home page generated by Wordle.