me.edu.au will soon include a blog as significant new tool. This will coincide with me.edu.au moving out of beta version. me.edu.au is a professional networking service and provides a simple and easy to use service to connect people of similar interests. The blog will allow users to go into more detail about their view and interests and include the full range of blog features including images and videos.
Why use the me.edu.au blog?
Members of me.edu.au who already have a blog may ask: why start a new blog here? One answer is that there is an option to link one’s me.edu.au blog to an external blog. Another is that there are some impressive functions that come from working within a blog + environment like me.edu.au. Chief among these is the search capacity. A search in me.edu.au for ‘internet, safety’, for example, brings up a comprehensive search result for the whole site. So this reveals blog posts, Communities, personal profiles and whiteboard entries that include these two words. This means that a user interested in a topic can very quickly find all relevant links to topics of interest. This is a very powerful way of connecting people with similar interests.
me.edu.au is aimed at a large number of educators who currently do not have a blog. Being able to establish a simple blog in an environment like this will be attractive to first-time bloggers because me.edu.au is built for people to connect with each other. Blogging is often a lonely business, and takes considerable confidence to engage with. The me.edu.au environment with its connected communities and personal profiles may well be a comfortable place to get started as a blogger.
Just wanted to let everyone know that a new release went into me.edu.au this week.
Some things that may interest you:
- When you post to someone’s whiteboard they will now receive an email message alerting them to this fact. (unfortunately this sometimes goes into your junk/trash folder) So please check and keep up to date on what is happening on your me.edu.au profile.
- The welcome / about me message now appears on your ‘my public profile’ page. So if you have not got anything in there it at the moment it would be worth visiting and editing/updating your profile to include something of interest. If you dont it just has an ‘about me’ box with nothing in it.
- There are a few user navigation improvements and updates also been added.
Enjoy the changes.
We are busy at the moment getting ready to add some admin features, a me homepage and a blog which will be very exciting. I will update everyone of these features as we get more details.
Remember to come in at any stage and update your profile in me. There are still a lot of profiles that dont have photos. The communities of interest are all growing and getting more and more active. Some of the most popular are:
Wikis
Grassroots Video
Digital Storytelling
Cyber Safety
Aust Digital Revolution
We have been receiving some good feedback from the crew that are going out and doing the edna workshops around Australia at the moment. One of the sessions is focused on me.edu.au and if you are going and want some more tips then please attend and also give any feedback. More details about the workshops are at: http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/help/workshops
March 13, 2008 – 12:57 pm
Just wanted to let everyone know that we have released today the new “smarter” search functionality into me. Well done Nick and Ben. What this means:
* have a search that works 
* have only one search - not a community and colleague search. Usability is heaps better.
* exact name search now works
* filter.
This is fantastic and something that was really needed.
We have started work on the help documentation of the me service and hopefully this will be finished shortly. You can view the current help at: http://www.edna.edu.au/edna/go/help/me
We are trying to gather our messages for me.edu.au and make them as simple and easy to understand - what do you think of this? We will start the promotion of this service in the coming months so your ideas on how best to market our newest service is welcomed….
me.edu.au Professional Network for Educators
me.edu.au provides Australian education and training professionals with an online networking and profile space.
Use me.edu.au to
- create an online professional resume
- connect with educators who have similar interests
- share links, news, photos, ideas, opinions
Until we have more … Stay in touch
Kate
February 12, 2008 – 8:30 am
There has been a small release to me.edu.au yesterday. The most visible features are:
- Relevant links from edna now show in communities. eg. http://me.edu.au/c/Professional%20Associations This gives further information and value to the communities.
- Icons are now used for feeds showing the various sources. See the screenshot below or visit me.edu.au
We have been busy working on release 2 specifications which we are looking to release early April. This release includes:
- a smarter search technology for users and communities,
- a content space for users within the profile and
- a blog service.
We will keep you posted as we get closer to completing specifications and know more on release dates.
January 23, 2008 – 8:43 am
Since me.edu.au (beta) is still in its early days of growth it is too early to tell how members will use the service, but we can report on early developments. In Communities we can measure number of members in a Community, number of contributions and visitors’ time viewing a page.
The busiest Community is Beginning Teachers, but this is apparently due to new teachers visiting, looking for useful material, and then moving on, spending an average of 55 seconds there. Until recently there was little content on the page. By contrast, the most lively Community is Digital Storytelling which has a lot of members, has a large number of whiteboard entries and links, and visitors spend an average of 2min 10 sec.
Other active communities are:
- me-edu-au
- web2ools
- Twitter
- Social Networking
- Australian Digital Revolution
- Wikis
Of course this is only one view of ’success’. There may well be Communities that are working on a small scale that are very beneficial to those involved.
January 11, 2008 – 1:11 pm
The Communities in me.edu.au has had a couple of improvements. Firstly, the tag cloud that shows the top 100 Communities now takes level of activity as well as number of members into account, so the relative size is a closer reflection of a Community’ level of lively-ness. As the amount of activity increases the difference between the most active and the least active will become more apparent in the size of the name.
Second, Communities now each have an rss feed (just add /rss). This means that one can readily display all one’s communities in a feed reader, as is shown on the image below and quickly scan for interesting new contributions.
January 9, 2008 – 3:30 pm
me.edu.au is surprisingly open to linking. The Digital Storytelling community is at http://www.me.edu.au/c/Digital%20Storytelling, http://www.me.edu.au/p/jtravers goes to me, Web2ools community is here: all without logging in.
So it is really easy to promote a Community or an individual profile by sharing addresses. Already some of the Communities are generating a lively set of links and comments, and the scrolling whiteboard and links lists can contain significant amounts of information.
January 4, 2008 – 11:01 am
Now that me.edu has been running for several weeks we can start to get a feel for how it works. Since all users of edna services are automatically registered with me.edu we cannot take the nearly 2,000 current members as meaning that all these are active users. However a large number of members have indicated Interests and are therefore are members of Communities. But quite a few Communities are inactive so far. There are some quite lively Communities, despite the distraction of the Christmas - New Year break. Among these are Digital Storytelling, Web2, Social Networking.
There is an interesting blog entry from Bradley Horowitz who is head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo! Search Marketplace about levels of participation in social networking sites. He says that in Yahoo Groups,
- “1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)
- 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress
- 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)”
But me.edu is a different sort of site from Yahoo Groups, and makes comments easy to make (we think) but these numbers might still apply. It remains to be seen whether people’s willingness to contribute is evolving, as the tools become easier to use and the communities (of various sorts) become less threatening. I wonder if there is a desirable balance of contributors and observers in a community? If it is 5 out of 100 and the five are having a healthy exchange and the observers are benefiting is that OK? I expect that the number of contributors is the critical number. Once there is a sufficient number to make the exchange lively, it is not important how many reader-only member there are in a Community.
An upgrade to how Communities are rated in the Communities listing will make selection of active Communities easier. At present the Communities with the largest number of members are shown as large. In the upgrade, next week, greater account will be given to the level of activity in each Community. So big means busiest.
December 18, 2007 – 12:40 pm
Feeds are unfamiliar to many regular internet users, but they are one of the most powerful features of me.edu.au because they allow a member to automatically display in their Public Profile a summary of all their current online activity - blogs, social bookmarking wiki pages etc.
Here is an audio-visual tutorial on how to bring feeds into your Profile. It is a VoiceThread, and you can leave audio comments on the presentation.
