If you subscribe to any of our CETIS mailing lists you’ll probably be aware that each month I send out a newsletter summarising our blog posts and news stories over the previous month as well as information on our publications, events and sector funding opportunities. As part of this I always include a Top Five posts section, highlighting the five most popular posts of the month – a really interesting look at what our audiences are actually interested in. So with the new year now firmly in place, it seemed like the ideal time to take a look back at what you enjoyed reading – and we enjoyed writing – in 2011…
What you liked reading
The top 20 most read posts of 2011 were:
- UKOER 2: Dissemination protocols in use and Jorum representation (26 August 2011) John Robertson
- Mobile Web Apps: a briefing paper (2 March 2011) Mark Power
- A TAACCCTful mandate? OER, SCORM and the $2bn grant (25 January 2011) Lorna Campbell
- Weak Signals and Text Mining II – Text Mining Background and Application Ideas (12 May 2011) Adam Cooper
- W3C Opens UK & Ireland Office (19 April 2011) Mark Power
- Analysis and structure of competence (4 January 2011) Simon Grant
- British Standards in ICT for Learning Education and Training – What of it? (24 January 2011) Adam Cooper
- Playing with canvas and webgl (21 April 2011) David Sherlock
- eBooks in Education – Looking at Trends (10 March 2011) Adam Cooper
- Google custom search for UKOER (20 January 2011) Phil Barker
- JISC CETIS OER Technical Interest Group (6 January 2011 ) Lorna Campbell
- ÜberStudent, Edubuntu – A sign of what is to come? (8 February 2011) Adam Cooper
- JISC CETIS OER Technical Mini Projects Call (2 March 2011) Phil Barker
- Crib sheet for 2011 Educause Horizon Report (9 February 2011) Sheila MacNeill
- Weak Signals and Text Mining I – An Introduction to Weak Signals (12 May 2011) Adam Cooper
- From Design to implementation – DVLE programme Strand A Showcase (31 January 2011) Sheila MacNeill
- Considering OAI-PMH (21 January 2011) John Robertson
- The Learning Registry: “Social Networking for Metadata” (22 March 2011) Dan Rehak (othervoices)
- Using video to capture reflection and evidence (17 March 2011) Sheila MacNeill
- Google Apps for Education UK User Group (16 February 2011) Sheila MacNeill
This information was generated by AWStats for our blogs.cetis.org.uk domain, although we’ve recently begun using Google Analytics for tracking, as discussed in David’s excellent post on developing a web analytics strategy for a distributed organisation such as CETIS.
The majority of the most popular posts are from the early part of 2011. While this is unsurprising – the longer a post has been up, the more chance there is for people to find it – it’s also quite reassuring that the information we’re posting is still relevant and of interest to people after its original appearance!
As stats are collected only for our self-hosted blogs, those that are hosted elsewhere are unfortunately missing. We don’t have any figures for Scott Wilson’s excellent blog which is always very well worth a read, or for Mark Power’s after May 2011 when he moved to his own domain – again, very well worth keeping track of.
What we enjoyed writing
While some of our posts are obviously of wider interest to our community than others, it’s not necessarily the ones with the most hits that are our personal favourites of the year. I asked my colleagues which was their favourite story they blogged in 2011 and why…
Adam Cooper: Mine is Preparing for a Thaw – Seven Questions to Make Sense of the Future because I wrote it in the car park of Leeds University and because I enjoyed doing the visualisation which is still hidden in the comments (DOH!)
Christina Smart: My favourite post was Business Adopts Archi Modelling Tool which was an interview with Phil Beauvoir. I’ve done a number of interviews this year, and I always enjoy an excuse to chat to people who are so enthusiastic about what they do. I’ve picked this one because Archi had a great year last year, and to see a JISC funded tool gaining traction outside HE is quite rare, and clearly something to celebrate. (although no zombies)
David Sherlock: I’m not very good at writing and find blogging quite stressful so I’d say my favourite links are more to do with the things I was playing with that I found interesting behind the scenes rather than the writing bit. I’m going to go with Playing with canvas and webgl because I found using the canvas element to draw shapes was fun, it reminded me of of when coding was fun on my Commodore 64.
Li Yuan: Big Data and analytics in education and learning. “Big Data” and “analytics” is one of the topics that the JISC observatory working group have agreed to further investigate and look at since they are being applied to all sectors, including government, health, business, etc. This blog post was just an introduction to the concept of Big Data and the implications in teaching, learning and administration in institutions, many aspects are worth further exploring, such as technical, pedagogical and organisational issues in relation to application of big data and analytics in education.
Lisa Corley: Well, i’m not a prolific blogger, but would probably choose What’s in a Word(le)? Lifelong Learning and Work Based Learner experiences… mainly because it brought together lots of work in the programme I had just finished supporting, and after reading all the final reports and summarising them it felt useful to have the summaries in the public domain rather than in some report hidden away somewhere. I also really liked doing the ‘visualisations’ as I think it helps to look at the information in a different way.
Lorna Campbell: Suppose it would have to be a A TAACCCTful mandate? OER, SCORM and the $2bn grant which was an attempt to cut through the crap and provide a rational summary of a rather overheated situation. *cough* It also happened to be nominated for the second annual “Downes Prize”.
John Robertson: Hmm, I have to admit that some of the posts from last year which I like the best are ones that never quite got properly started or finished. Perhaps partially because of that and partially because it was a “throw away” response to a tweet which ended up drawing together and developing some of my thinking about open ed. There’s lots about it that I think is imperfect (e.g. using the word “manifesto”) but it got some things right and there was a certain serendipity to its creation which makes me smile: An OER manifesto in twenty minutes.
Phil Barker: Modern Art of Metadata. Unexpected interest during a meeting of the advisory group of the Resource Discovery Task Force Vision Implementation Plan Management Framework (I kid you not).
Rowin Young: My favourite post is my look at the excitement that surrounded the Mozilla Open Badges Initiative after the announcement of a substantial prize fund for developments, Badges, identity and the $2million prize fund. It touched on a number of areas that are of particular interest to me, including gaming achievement systems as both motivators and exploiters and the increasing trend for using elements from gaming in other contexts, identity management in both the technical and social aspects, assessment and accreditation. Writing the post provided me with an opportunity to work out a lot of my thinking around the topic, and I really enjoyed working on it.
Scott Wilson: My personal fave is this one: Converting Chrome Installed Web Apps into W3C Widgets. Not because its that great a post, but because of all the chaos that ensued at W3C and elsewhere. This got picked up by Opera, who used it to publicly berate Google and Mozilla about supporting open standards, which drew in Microsoft, and before the end of the month even Adobe had joined in. It actually led more or less directly to the “future of offline web apps” event which was a huge success, and so there may even be a positive outcome.
Sharon Perry: Although I’m not a prolific blogger (only 3 posts in 2011!), I did like the story about using crowdsourcing to highlight and help companies repair inaccessible websites (Crowdsourcing to Fix the Web). I think crowdsourcing is becoming a very important part of social interaction on the web. Not only can it help solve larger problems by developing micro-solutions but it encourages people to interact and engage with the area concerned. There is often no financial advantage for those who take part, but the pay-off is perhaps more intangible, i.e. a person who provides such support or help may in turn get that “feel good factor” and a greater sense of well-being for being involved in the greater good. I suppose I’m also highlighting this story again because the “Fix the Web” cause is now running out of funds and is struggling to survive. I hope it gets the funds it needs to continue and that it may act as an example to other social enterprises. Long may crowdsourcing continue!
Sheila MacNeill: My favourite post of last year was called Betweenness Centrality – helping us understand our networks. There are a couple of reasons I’ve picked it. Firstly what started out as as a serendipitous twitter conversation introduced me to a new concept (betweenness centrality) which I was able to reflect on in terms of CETIS and its networks. It also helped me to begin to consolidate some thoughts around SNA (social network analysis) and in relation to CETIS as how we can visualise, share understand and build our networks. Over the past year I’ve been experimenting with Storify as a way to re-publish tweets into coherent stories, and this post allowed me to combine this technique within a more contextualised post. And finally, the original conversation help brighten up quite a dull bank holiday Monday and legitimately referencing zombies in a work related post was just too hard to resist.
Simon Grant: I nominate Grasping the future (which I had completely forgotten about) for several reasons. First, it wasn’t something I was thinking about self-consciously and deliberately, but thoughts that came to me from interaction with other people in IEC. I think often that’s the best tradition in blogging: something that would probably not see the light of day were it not for a convenient public platform. Second, because the comments it attracted are really interesting and stimulating in their own right. And third, because re-reading it makes me think, yes, there is something there that I or we really should take forward, something waiting to grasp in the future.
Many thanks to all my colleagues for their contributions to this post, and to all our readers for engaging with, commenting on and sharing what we write – here’s to a great 2012!
