Using social media in learning

A question was asked in the social media community of practice (various levels of authentication required) about using web 2.0 technology to support learning. I couldn’t help myself… Blogging Using blogs to record and share learning is a really nice…

A digital engagement glossary

This glossary of social media and digital engagement terms comes from a recent piece of my strategy work. It’s skewed towards the government sector, in terms of language and examples. Feel free to use any of this that might be…

2009’s top tech

Here’s a quick roundup of some things I’ve really started to get some use out of in 2009. Not necessarily services that were new to the last 12 months, but ones which became a vital part of my toolkit. You’ll…

Gov 2.0 Taskforce report published

The final report from Australia’s Government 2.0 Taskforce has been published. I’ve not had the chance to read it yet, but the summary points sound sane enough: Government 2.0 or the use of the new collaborative tools and approaches of…

Building local government 2.0

The Knowledge Hub is a terrifically ambitious project being run by IDeA, in partnership with CLG, to bring knowledge and information sharing to the local government sector. A mixture of technology and capacity building, the aim is to alter the…

What I use

Sometimes it’s nice to hear what tech people use on a day to day basis. It’s useful to pick up hints and tips, and to pick up on cool tools you might not have heard of before. Here’s my day-to-day…

Dotspots

DotSpots looks interesting: DotSpots is an annotation platform that allows users to add text or video comments to any piece of text on the web. Dotspots searches through millions of online news articles, indexing paragraphs of text and using an…

The web and safeguarding – a new project

Dom Campbell of FutureGov has blogged about the start of a new project around how the web can help improve and innovate in children’s services. This project will kick off with a get together of interested folk: To start off…

Disposable online chat

TinyChat is a really cool new service that lets you create simple chatrooms on the fly within your browser. Why is this useful? Well, say you want to get a bunch of people together for a chat, but you don’t…

New media for a new generation

I spent a very enjoyable day today at an event co-organised by Opportunity Links and 4Children. It was a good chance to listen to some interesting and challenging content about the social web and what young people are actually doing…

ReadWriteGov is this Wednesday!

This Wednesday sees the first of hopefully many ReadWriteGov events taking place at Peterborough City Council. It’s going to be a great day, with some excellent speakers, all of whom are working within the public sector trying to get things…

Cool Local Gov Web Stuff

I have started a wiki to collect together resources and stories of where local government has used the web in interesting ways. You can find it at – please visit and add any bits you can think of. If…

Free software, or just go online?

Following some of the points made on my post about Kubuntu and Linux yesterday, I’ve been wondering a bit more about free software and how it might help people make the most of their equipment. After all, software is expensive…

Next Gen KM

Knowledge management is something that really interests me, and it’s something that I think governmental organisations at all levels in the UK need to start seriously addressing. Of course, being a social media fanboy too means that I like to…

Dead tree web 2.0 reading list

There are a number of books out there which are covering a lot of the stuff I am interested in with regard to the web and collaboration. It might be worth coming up with a reading list – how about…

Two point oh? Or zero?

The BBC are coming up with guidance on how staff should pronounce the phrase “Web 2.0”. Is it, for example: Web two point oh Web two point zero Web two dot oh Web two etc etc etc… I have always…