Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects – part 3 of 3
This is the final post in a 3 part series about using web 2 services in JISC projects. This final part briefly discusses using skype and dealing with meetings before moving on to general advice about IPR, publicising details and further information.
Part 1 of the series discusses using tags for projects, twitter and blogs.
Part 2 discusses social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking.
The full document of all 3 parts can be downloaded from the JISC Information Environment repository.
Skype
Skype started off as a telephone service which ran over the network. It has now been extended to provide other services including instant messaging, video calls, file-sharing, screen-sharing. If you have a headset and a microphone it is a useful way to hold teleconferences with multiple participants.
It is also a useful way to get instant answers from contacts as you can see when people are online and available to be contacted to ask questions using the telephone service or the instant messaging service.
Skype FAQs
Q: Do you have to pay for Skype?
A: No – not for basic services. There are some functions that require payment. Details are on the skype site.
Q: How do I find out who is available using Skype?
A: Skype has a directory look-up service built in. It also has services whereby it uses your email list of contacts to see if any of your friends are Skype users.
Getting consensus – scheduling meetings, doing surveys
Doodle is a simple but very effective free website that you can use to do things such as agree a meeting date or do a simple survey. It is easy to set up a list of possible dates or options, and you then can email a URL to everyone, so that they can specify their preferences.
Publicising your project’s contact details
All publicity is good. Make it as easy as possible for people to discover your project and keep up to date with developments by making it easy for people to see what sources are available. List them on your project website and any publicity materials and put them in your email signature. Details that are useful to share include:
- Your project’s name (and acronym expansion)
- Your project tag and any other relevant tag
- Relevant twitter ids
- Website and blog site
- Links to relevant resources or public aggregations of resources that provide further information about the area you are working in.
- Your contact details – including Skype if you use it
Further information
Of course it is good practice with using all of these services to read the terms and conditions first to make sure they align with how you want to use the service. There is a useful toolkit called web2rights which can help you navigate IPR in a web 2.0 world.
This is only a limited overview of some of the services available. A more comprehensive list can be found in a previous post on this blog.
There is a JISC project called web2practice being run by Netskills to produce guides to using web 2.0. Guides on:
- Social Media;
- RSS;
- Collaborative Writing;
- Podcasting;
- Microblogging;
can be found on the web2practice blog.
Feedback and the future of this guide
So that is a brief overview of some of the most useful services. Obviously there are glaring omissions from this guide and we would really appreciate hearing from you which web services you find useful in managing your projects and how you use them. We will gather feedback into an updated and more thorough guide in the future.
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