Specialised communities of practice using Web2.0 AND sharing slides on a blog!

Three areas of relevance to SHEEN Sharing for this post:

1. It gives direct access to an excellent resource I came across today via Twitter: it was Tweeted as a link by @andypowe11, AKA Andy Powell of EduServ, who I follow on Twitter. Excellent work again, Twitterverse! If anyone involved in SHEEN Sharing wants to join Twitter and start following me, I’ll try to re-Tweet things of interest so you can see them.

2. The content of the slideshow below I find very interesting. Although the author is talking about the use of Web2.0 to support communities of practice in the form of e-science researchers, I found much of what it said relevant to my investigations into Web2.0 for SHEEN Sharing. Perhaps there are similarities: both involve small, highly specialised and distributed communities of practice. Worth a look.

3. Last and by no means least, it’s an example of how easy it is to embed a slide presentation into a blog post from SlideShare. SlideShare is to presentations what Flickr is to photos. Free, open access, with community and commenting features, tagging and feeds available. I have a few presentations up there myself. I like the fact that if you click on the big green arrow below, it will take you through the slideshow without you having to click anything else. So far we’ve put our SHEEN Sharing slides on Scribd: scroll to the bottom of the screen for an example of how Scribd slideshows appear in a blog post- interesting comparison?

How I did it: I followed the link Andy sent, watched the slideshow, liked it, bookmarked it in Delicious, first off tagged sheensharing_web2 so it would be available to me for my research, and also appear in the feed in the column to the right, then thought I would embed it directly in the SHEEN Sharing blog to see how that would look.

Straight away saw a “post to WordPress” link under the slides, clicked it, then copied the pre-highlighted bit of code in the second box. I pasted this code straight into a new post here in SHEEN Sharing, hit “Save Draft”, then “Preview”, and was able to immediately see how nice it looks in the blog. Went back and wrote the text you’ve been reading above and below the pasted-in code.

That’s it!

Anyway, just for comparison, let’s see what happens when I embed the Scribd code for our SHEEN Sharing introductory slides in a post (using much the same technique- go to document in Scribd, select “Click for WordPress.com embed”, copy and paste pre-filled code):

View this document on Scribd

Comments welcome!