Wordpress Blog as Online CV and Personal Development Auditor

Spark for this session was this blog post "is technology eating your job". http://www.michelemmartin.com/thebambooprojectblog/2013/03/clarifying-your-career-path-technology-is-eating-your-job.html

Made me realize in a competitive job market place how important it is to be organised and ready for to secure the (a) job that you want. This got me thinking, then got me playing and then sharing my thoughts with a small group of social media enthusiasts at the university where i work - De Montfort University.

Before we start the images incorporated into this blog below can be viewed much more clearly by watching this flicker slideshow in full screen or go directly too the  flickr Wordpress CV slideshow.

The image below gives you a snapshot view of the user view of the Wordpress CV blog that i envisage

WordPress CV Blog - User View

The following notes collate the main points that were addressed in our session.

Purpose of this Session

1. Highlight the use of Social media (wordpress) as a medium to organise CV information and Record Personal Development information. It is a career imperative to be organised.

2.  Highlight how WordPress (and other blogging platforms) can be adapted and used for many purposes. A Blog is a Blog is a Blog - No! Blog platforms are very flexible and with creativity they can be used for many different things.

Setup and thinking

1. Use this technique with any easily created Blog from http://wordpress.com.

2. No programming skills required.

3. You can make wordpress Private to you! and that was and currently is my intention, whilst i am still building this site.

In any event, the intention is for it to be private, the idea is for you to organize your history, skills and assets in an easily getattable :-) format, in order to customize CV's as appropriate for the job in hand (which generally need to be completed in specific online or offline electronic application forms).

In this process of CV building you can give deeper consideration to the larger projects that you have worked on in your day to day work and use categorisation and tagging to indicate what skills, experience or knowledge they show evidence of. There will also be many smaller day to day skills and many professional developmental sessions that you have attended and that you can easily record in this way.

4. Once finalized the question that can more fully addressed, shall i make it public or parts of it public. Which may be an option, but was not the original intention. In our small discussion the idea was suggested that maybe the CV can be tailored in some way - this is something i will look to consider as i move on and see if there is a feasible way of doing this - I will report back.

Other questions - Can  a portfolio of electronic evidence be incorporated or should the portfolio be separate (can be organised using the same approach as i will outline in the following paragraphs).

Worpress Features, how they are used and Useful Strategies.

1. SELECT A THEME that suits your need. I was looking for a very simple theme. i chose Theme: Ari by Elmastudio. 

2. CATEGORIES AND TAGGING Tailor the theme so that the only widget displayed is the Category widget. You will be posting various information from your CV as a series of blog posts ORGANISED by category. Tagging can add a further element of organisation and cut across two or more categories. In my current theme I could add a tag cloud widget. I chose not to as i did not like the tag cloud widget, i prefer a list but this was not available. A list widget would probably have changed my mind. Perhaps it is simpler without it anyway (tag links are still listed at the bottom of posts)

3. CREATING CATEGORIES In the Admin view we need to create the CV categories. This can be done at the beginning in the post categories section (you could use the category menu image below which shows my categorization as i guide) or add the categories to the posts as i did whilst i was developing my thinking on how best to order my menu.

Menu - The ordered list of categories

If you look at the example menu above you will probably agree that the first four or five categories will be quite standard.  From 5-12 you may want to modify these categories to suit your particular circumstance and  to clarify and record your skills  You may have many strings to your bow e.g. examples of decisive management, examples of fostering positive change, examples of supporting people at work.

4. PRACTICAL TIPS for displaying and working with your CV

i) Use 01, 02.. etc at the start of category titles to order in a way that suits you - easy to change using quick edit. (Facilitates the Alphabetical menu order which you can control)

ii) This next two part tip, combined with the categorisation is probably the MOST IMPORTANT element to make this blogging tool useful for coherent organisation, both from a user view and from an admin view.

Part 1) Visually Number Posts at the start of the post title with the category number and the order within that category that you want. e.g. 7.1, 7.2, 7,3

Part 2) Change the blog post date to order the posts in admin view - each section has a category tag - a category (conceptually) can be assigned a month and year to order posts, posts within a category can be ordered further by the number of days in the month. So if there were two posts in our 01 Education category, I would make sure that both posts were dated March 2013 (previous month ago from the date of this post). Now for the first post i would set the date the March 30 and for the second March 29. Post dates are easily changed using QUICK EDIT. 

Thus the posts in admin and user views are now both visually and practically ordered for a coherent working environment.

Worpress Admin - A post in Quick edit mode with Date, category and Tags highlighted

5. Might have mentioned this earlier but The PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT element will encourage you to record examples of your everyday work that can be used as evidence to support essential and desirable requirements that you see listed in CV application documents. You can use these requirements to prepare for similar requirements in the future - eventually covering all basis.

Wordpress - Admin View

5. OTHER RELATED USES

Can you think how this approach can be harnessed for other uses. I  think there could be quite a lot of applications. Possibles:

1. I have already mentioned - Use to build a portfolio either separately or within the CV.

2. As an educational programme builder for a team ( instead of a wiki maybe)

6. EXTRAS That came out of our small group discussion.

1. Good to give Employers the option to peruse through an online CV if they wish. A Paper based version would be overwhelming, but online CV in this manner could be more appealing and make it easier for employers to deleve further if they wanted to.

2. If made public (can be limited to a set few as well) - the comments boxes could be used for endorsements.

7. FINAL THOUGHT

These notes were orginally to support a face to face show and tell presentation. I may try and setup an Dummy Wordpress CV site for anyone interested to get a better picture of how this works.

Technology Celebration at DMU and A Triumvirate platform for success

Symposium Highlight

Just returned from the typically heartening and uplifting Biennial DMU Technology Enhanced Learning Symposium. Biggest impact for me came not from any of the presenters but the attendance of the recently appointed Manager of ISAS (Information Services & Systems), Michael Robinson. It was obvious to see he had a keen and genuine interest in finding out what technology was important to staff at DMU. I had a very brief chat with Michael, but my impression is that he is not just a technical guy, but appreciates how important technology is to the culture not only of teaching and learning, but also to internal and external organisation communication. I hope my first impressions are correct because it will fit very well with all the excellent technology enhanced learning initiatives that our e-learning co-ordinator Richard Hall has driven through.

DMU TEL 2010 Conference logo/themes

It's the Culture not the Technology

A lot of what has been achieved at DMU in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning has been derived from a culture that has encouraged innovation, self expression, self development and a sense of worth in contributing to organizational aspirations.
The general theme of the conference centered around the importance of culture in driving the technology and not the other way around. Keynote speaker Dave White warned of the dangers of not being clear about what your values and aims are otherwise technology will drive and push you to places that maybe you do not want to go. An interesting read related to culture and the use of new social media is Tribes by Set Godin


Keynote Speaker Dave White and the points that touched a chord

Other key points Dave made where having an appreciation of the types of students (customers) that we have and how this might affect how we deal with them. Using his excellent Visitors and Residents analogy he offered a view of how the student population will range on a continuum from those just visiting web spaces, getting information and retreating offline and those students that see being online in all manner of web spaces as part of there natural normal daily life, just like going to the park and hanging out with friends. I remember previously reading that Dave suggests that different approaches may taken in different area of life i.e. socially with friends, at work and educationally for example. Not totally sure of the implications for me in any teaching that i do, but i will give it some consideration in the future.

VisitorResident on Prezi

It kind of chimes in with another theme of Dave's which is the conflict of what a student wants and what they need. For example Students often take the strategic surface approach to learning in that they just want to learn about the things that will help them pass the assessment, whereas educationally what they might need to enhance their deep learning is group work and reflective work, which they may find an irritant, but is actually beneficial to them. Dave cited some evidence that just giving students what they want in online distance learning is not engaging enough and drop out rates are high. Dave noted that what students need is collaborative (and other deep learning) tasks to foster engagement and i wholeheartedly agree with this.

These observations tie in nicely with a Faculty workshop on plagiarism i attended yesterday and lead me to conclude that assessment strategies may benefit from a change in approach. Much better to have a series of ongoing tasks and assessments over the course of a semester, rather than one final assignment at the end. from a plagiarism and learning perspective progress can be monitored much more effectively resulting in better support and ultimately improved learning, improved work flow management and improved understanding of good academic practice, which should help in alleviating plagiarism issues in the cut and paste society that we now live in.

Another highlight from the conference was Dave's use of kinder eggs as prizes for his mini quizzes. It was not so much the eggs but the irreverent throwing of the eggs (very accurately) a la an America football quarterback to the winners sitting in the audience. Way to go Dave.

More Highlights
Attended an excellent presentation by Malcolm Andrew and Anthony Eland demonstrating two tools that can be used to develop e-learning materials Xerte And Adobe Captivate. Xerte is free and looks to me like a very useful 'rough and ready' ) way for lecturers to easily create interactive learning material for students.

Adobe Captivate looks slightly more complex for non technical lecturers to work with, but it looks very powerful to me and seems to have the upper hand on my favourite dektop screen recording software Camtasia in that there is much more opportunity to also create interactive learning material and with the added bonus that it can be integrated into Blackboard to collate grades in the gradebook center.

Pleased with the turnout for the workshop that myself and Richard Davies ran on Extending Learning through online synchronous classrooms. (embedded presentation is playing up - try link until i can sort it out)

Online Synchronous Classrooms on Prezi

I thought it was good getting a couple of different perspectives on how this technology can be used. Both examples related to distance learners, Richard delivering live lectures offering convenience to distance learning and a level of togetherness and connectedness that improves upon asynchronous activities and myself conducting more interactive participative classes trying to take advantage of the wide and varied learning tools available in the online synchronous classroom. Using Camtasia we managed to produce two videos that showed snippets of how we worked in this environment. There is definite interest in web conferencing technology, i hope we can build on the interest to enhance teaching and learning and professional development oportunities at DMU. One by product of presenting at this workshop was an opportunity to work more extensively with Camtasia, which I used to edit the recordings of the wimba and webex workshops that Richard and i showed as examples of our work and the decision to use prezi rather than powerpoint to present the workshop. I created a pretty basic presentation in the style of a powerpoint, but it has given me a good grounding in the basics of prezi.

A Triumvirate platform for success
And so to a triumvirate platform for success - What do I mean by this, well Dave White pointed out during his presentation how institutionally that there will be innovators and pragmatists and that there often tensions between the two. Tensions also to be found between the IT Hardware and Software guardians and the needs of a variety groups that have cultural and work practices that lend themselves to a wide variety of preferred approaches in how technology is best deployed.

I see Richard as the University e-learning co-ordinator having led strongly on laying the foundations for a positive and progressive culture for development here at DMU, both from a teaching and learning perspective and more widely in other areas of DMU. It seems to me that our new leader at ISAS Michael Robinson brings a positive approach in engaging with staff needs at DMU. This combined with the strong work that is done in Professional Development at DMU - Academically with Jane Clarke and her team and Generally with Vincent Cornelius and his team I believe lays a strong triumvirate platform for success in integrating technology into the DMU culture and not the other way around.

Go DMU Go :-)