Inge Ignatia de Waard

here here, indeed facebook is too dispersed to focus. I also had to make the decision to only focus on what I could use = content.

But in the opennotebook experience that Jean-Claude (see always open thread) is into there is something really interesting. He links all the social media together so basically making a social media landscape focussed on specific content. This way you can use the applications for your own content goals.

I like to be focussed.

ah, I see. But for the qualitative interviews easy-to-use videosoftware would seem enough, or VoIP for the ones that do not like to be seen or do not have a webcam.

Where I work we use asynchronous data collection, but we also do some life data output based on live data coming in from epidemics or similar research (Kevin Q. Harvey might be the person to contact if you are interested in this, he is the Assistant Director of Development for the Center for Advancement of Distance Education (CADE) in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and they have a project to train medics for pandemics which includes live data). The eLearning Guild has been using it as well to put out there member's data (Steve Wexler is a person you might want to contact if this has your interest).

The great thing about Kevin Harvey is that they worked on the first Clinic (based on the real clinic) in Second Life. The simulations of the pandemic are also in SL.

Hope these people can help you.

I am going to keep the idea of not selecting a team in advance in my mind, I wonder if this approach also works within a company/institution if you are looking to promote social media for the first time.

I like the intention to be completely open. The only experience that comes a bit close with this idea, is with a Telemedicine forum that is open to all but requires a (free) registration. Although this is a limitation, we had to build it in so patients would not start to use certain medication on their own behalf. Telemedicine is a website for medical doctors and health care workers that work on HIV/AIDS related ART in low resource settings. They can all put cases in that they do not know how to treat and then peers and designated specialists (we had to start with specialists to make sure the exchange was based on medical good practices, but we soon learned that everyone learned a lot specialists included and peers became specialists for certain regions). This openness allowed all of them to continually get updated on the latest information through one another. So although this website was a bit restricted, the open exchange of ideas within it delivered an enourmous surplus (networking, new strategies, more knowledge from the field...)

In the same way (but less organized I have planned organizing my resources, presentations for this summer) as Janet, I have been posting my own learning trajectory as well as presentations I have made, things I tried (mostly the successful ones, now trying to gather the failures to post as well) ... At this point I do not have any extra's that would generate an income, which - in dire straight days does make me wonder - but for me it is a principle to share knowledge. Somewhere along the line I belief that only interested and willing people will pick it up (for the most part).

This sharing is done by using social media: my blog in the first place, streaming and sharing my live presentations through ustream.tv (still need to work on improving my 'techy travel bag'), sharing my slides through slideshare and dabbling with other media to see if those shares add up to useful things.

All the time I wonder if this openness will be a good thing in the long run. I did see some of my presentation slides pop-up elsewhere, but mostly they did honor my Creative Commons license, so I did get mentioned. In some cases the people contacted me directly to ask if they could use some of the content.

Do any of you use a creative commons license or a similar license to be able to give some pointers on how you would like people to use your content?

The "failed experiments" idea is something I am working on now as well. I used to go ahead and write down what I thought was of importance (only thinking about the positive outcomes). I did some 'failure feedback' in the beginning, but apparently did not find it that important to continue. At a given moment I noticed that colleagues were struggling because I did not give them feedback on my own failures. At this moment we are trying to gather all the things we launched ourselves in and why it did not work out (for us).

I wonder if there is such a wiki as 'some social media did work for me because...' it would be worthwhile to follow this and see what can be useful.

Your remark on finding collaborators and friends interests me. As my network grows, I start to see a character pattern that I did not anticipate. Apparently I link to people that have specific personalities (which might to some extend) be similar to RL friends.

Could you pinpoint a contra that you would still like to tackle with opennotebook science? (I saw progressing positively for the most part)