DaChispa

I have just seen a link on MSN with the title above which collates new things that we didn’t know 7 days ago http://news.uk.msn.com/what-we-learned-this-week.aspx . This is such a simple idea and really highlights how much our store of knowledge is growing. It is also a great way of reflecting on what we have learnt as individuals over the last 7 days.

So, what have I learned this week?

- however technically knowledgeable you are, it is still intimidating to put up your first entries on a new wiki with strangers
- you can offer people too many options, sometimes it is better to limit the choice
- it’s better to put minutes first on the agenda of a meeting (I’m still not sure about this one – it can derail a meeting sometimes, but apparently that’s meeting good practice)
- you can create new calendars within Outlook 2000 for things such as personal diaries – but group calendars don’t exist in that version
- Gordon Brown twitters! http://twitter.com/DowningStreet
- When presenting, you should always establish your credentials up front (or get someone to do it for you) so that people are more inclined to listen and take you seriously
- Carey can be a girl’s name as well as a boy’s name (this mistake caused a lot of embarassment!)
- a new way of doing stomach exercises with legs in a frog position that really protects my back
- there is something called ‘sentiment analysis technology’ which can track opinions in key areas http://www.jodange.com/

I think it would be fun to do this with a group of colleagues and see what our collective knowledge looks like. I strongly suspect that we would all learn something new.

Finally go round to upgrading the software for my blog. It seems to have worked, although I ended up having to do a lot of it manually due to limitations of upload time. I can understand that they don’t want to overload servers, but the result was that I spent all afternoon doing something that probably should only have taken half an hour max. Anyway, I think it’s worked and am just posting this placeholder to test it all out.

I notice that there is now the facility in the latest version of the software to upload media as well. I can feel a podcast coming on. I bought a really neat recorder for my i-pod that makes it a doddle to create podcasts. Just plug it in and off you go. I’ve also been made aware of a free media editing piece of software (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) which will make it even easier to play with this. Just need to find something worthwhile to say now.