Our Netvibes Page Inspires a University Careers Service: Can They Inspire You?

What with SHEEN Sharing having visibility on Twitter and Diigo and the blogosphere, we’ve picked up a few followers from outwith the ECN, which is great.

We got a very kind Tweet today on Twitter from Darren Jones at the University of Sussex Careers and Employability Centre.  BTW: you can see they are already pretty au fait with Web 2.0: they use a blog to update their main page with big news (see under ‘Latest News’), and their Twitter account to give short pithy updates (scroll down a bit to see an embedded Twitter widget from their @sussxunicareers account), both embedded in the page.

Anyway, Darren likes our Netvibes page and is experimenting with using Netvibes to create a student careers page at Sussex.  Here it is.  You’ll notice he’s chosen to divide his tabs by subject area. Check it out!

I’ve bookmarked this in our Diigo Employability Group.

For ECN book-lovers: LibraryThing

It’s funny what you come up with when you’re supposed to be writing up a big old document (in my case, the final polished version of the SHEEN Sharing Literature Review and Requirements Review docs). Was thinking about LibraryThing, which is possibly my favourite Web 2.0 app, and one I only use for personal stuff.

It’s a huge favourite out there to, particularly as a cross-over into the web for Luddite book-lovers. Basically, you can make a web catalogue of all your books, and include reviews, ratings and tags. And you can see others’ reviews and ratings, and get automatic recommendations, and join groups of like-minded others.

When I joined I even wrote away for their lovely barcode reader in the shape of a cat (oh how they know their target audience!). Because you don’t have to manually catalogue your books: you can just enter the ISBN, and you’ll get the full catalogue record immediately. Plus a nice little thumbnail image of the book’s cover.

Thinking about applications of LibraryThing for SHEEN Sharing: some folk mentioned that many of their favourite resources are non-digital, hard copy only. Here’s a way of sharing those. Because, like everything else, LibraryThing offers feeds and widgets, so we can expose our recommended employability resources via our Netvibes page.

Also, small libraries now use LibraryThing to catalogue their collections online. There are a number of English university careers’ services already cataloguing their libraries there. To see what a LibraryThing feed looks like in Netvibes, go to the Student Resources tab on our Employability page; you’ll see one from The Careers Group (UoL), and one from King’s College London. NB: You can see reviews and recommendations, where available, by clicking on the books’ titles.

At the moment, as with Diigo, LibraryThing appears to have a small bug in its feed capabilities. It offers the ability to have a feed based on a search for the tag “employability”, but the feed doesn’t work. I’ve contacted them to find out if it’s a known bug, and when it will be fixed.

In the meantime though, if folk think it’s a nice idea, and if you have books and other hard-copy resources you want to share, we could start up a SHEEN Sharing LibrayThing account and start entering stuff there.

Only if there’s a demand though: we want to focus on Diigo first!

Universities’ Careers Services using Twitter

Added to post from comment below, 6 May 2009 from Helen Curry at University of London Careers Group: Helen has a page on her blog listing Careers Services she knows of with Twitter accounts; she is keeping this list up-to-date: http://helencurry.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/careers-services-on-twitter-uk-he/.

Now that we have a SHEEN Sharing Twitter account for you to follow (@sheensharing), we’ve very quickly come across university careers services using Twitter for dissemination.

For instance, Keele University Careers Service tweets as @KeeleCareers.  Here’s a sample posting (with URL removed for their privacy’s sake):

Wonder what skills employers look for? Go to ‘Stand Out To Employers’ May 6, 1pm, K2. Book a place: [URL]

Then, @KeeleCareers “re-tweeted” (passed on a tweet they had received to their own followers, including us) a message from the University of London’s Careers Group, who tweet as @CareersGroup, which both alerted us to the the UoL’s Twitter account and sent us to their own blog post on some relevant student blogs:

blogging: Desperately seeking graduate jobs: top student-led blogs http://tinyurl.com/cy2apt

So, in a few minutes we are networked into some sources of resources. We can immediately click a button to follow these Twitter accounts, see their news quickly when we want to, read new items and pass them on in a jiffy.

How did I find @KeeleCareers in the first place? I did a search of Twitter (in the search box in the right-hand column) for “employability” just to see what came up. Very worth setting up targeted searches by the way; this can be done very simply within Twitter’s webpage, or in a more advanced way using a tool like TweetDeck). And there was a tweet from @KeeleCareers; being familiar with Keele University I immediately noticed it.

Running that “employablity” search again today, I see tweets from @jobs_manchester, @NorthEastTweets and @SkillsWork. I haven’t even investigated who these accounts belong to yet but I can already see another rich vein opening up.

Last week, I found @sheensharing was being followed by someone with the odd username of @idid_better. Thought it was a spammer at first but followed their link and discovered an organisation interested in:

“developing and promoting international learning experiences such as internships abroad”

.. so we followed them back to see what comes up there.

Interested? Get yourself a Twitter account soon and start following @sheensharing – we’ll re-tweet stuff to you and let you know what’s coming up of interest. Also, you can start following other ECN folk, as well as other people and organisations of specific interest to you. Conversations can be had quickly and information shared easily. Maybe you’ll even decide your own department (careers or otherwise) should start Twittering to reach students and teachers?

For information on using Twitter, see the earlier posting here.