Personal Blogs

Perkin's (1996) views on society are interesting and I can see some truth in what he describes. Modern industries are consolidating into larger companies through Mergers and Acquisitions (Baldwin et al, 2001), which will obviously lead to Executives and professionals gaining more power, with industries having a wide range of influence on government policy and society as a whole. For example, the current influence of the oil industry (Baker Institute Energy Forum, 2007) and drugs companies (Smith, 2005).

As Perkin highlights this will require greater demand for expertise, which is demonstrated clearly in the UK with the government's push to get more young people through higher education (Labour Party, n.d.).

Although professionals play a large role in shaping modern society, modern information technology and social networking also play a key role as proposed in the Information Society and Networking Society models (Wikipedia, n.d.). Perkin does take these into account to an extent by discussing the need for professionals to develop these technologies, but clearly does not consider them to the extent they have grown in the 12 years since the paper was written.

References

Baker Institute Energy Forum (2007), Strategies and Influence of Emerging National Oil Companies on World Energy Markets, Available from http://www.rice.edu/energy/research/nationaloil/docs/PECNOCstudyprotocolfinal.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Baldwin L, Camm F, Morre N, Appendix C: Industry Consolidation Trends in Federal Contract Bundling, Rand Corporation, Available from http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1224/MR1224.appc.pdf (accessed 25 November 2008)
Perkin, H. (1996) Chapter 1 of The Third Revolution: Professional Elites in the Modern World, London: Routledge.
Labour Party Website, http://www.labour.org.uk/ (accessed 25 November 2008)
Smith R (2005) Curbing the Influence of the Drug Industry: A British View. PLoS Med 2(9): e241, Available from http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020241&ct=1 (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Information Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_society (accessed 25 November 2008)
Wikipedia (n.d.), Network Society, Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_society (accessed 25 November 2008)

Having not really used an eportfolio before this course, it was interesting to look at some of the alternatives to MyStuff.

I looked at PebblePad and FolioLive.

PebblePad looked more user friendly with usability being it's main focus. However, whereas MyStuff seems based on the same principles of tagging and sharing that major social networking sites such as facebook and myspace are, in PebblePad although these features are present they seem to take more of a back seat.

FolioLive seemed to have less features, it didn't appear to offer much in the way of sharing options (other than to the course tutor) and it didn't look like you could tag work against the syllabus. However, as students paid their own subscription to the portfolio it did fit the lifelong webspace model more than the other 2 alternatives.

In all, all 3 had good features the other 2 lacked. However, in general, I like the principles that MyStuff is built on. Tagging, sharing, revision tracking, comments, etc. As has been pointed out my other students, however, it is quite clunky, but it is also fairly new in terms of development.

The online discussion for this task seemed to be minor, however. It seems a shame that full discussions don't seem to be taking place for these activities. There appear to be only a few students contributing to discussions and most of these take place in the course forums where other discussions take place rather than activity discussions where it seems to be more sets of postings with a few comments.

I'm not sure whether it's just that most students don't have time to look at many of the messages in the forums or whether the rest of the students are taking more of a passive role in the forums. Perhaps more discussion based activities are needed to encourage others to take a part in these discussions to make them seem more of a required part of the course.

I also had a look at the Open Source discussions in the supplementary activity. It was interesting that Martin's points on the open source products seemed to mirror what I had found when I first started using Linux as an open source desktop for my home PC. Given how much the desktop software has been developed over the past few years with the development of major products such as openoffice, it would be interesting to see if eportfolio development has mirrored this, if so some of the open source products could have a lot going for them now.

And now this blog is finally up to date with where I am in the course...

So far, MyStuff doesn't seem to make getting formative feedback on your work very easy, especially as it's very difficult to know when someone has commented on items.

With regards to sharing, I'm not really sure that this is serving much purpose with H808 at the moment. I'm not sure if anyone other than Alan has looked at any of the items I have shared, and I haven't looked at any one elses items (another thing I will have to make time to do, but where to start? What benefit would it offer?)

If these were referred to in reflections and discussions on blogs, then there would be more incentive to view them. Links could be included in the discussions to help view the items. This would be easier if the URLs were more user-friendly (in general all the OU technology could benefit from reviewing the URLs used, but I'll save this for a separate post).