Tag: diagram

Web apps and workflows

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

The JISC infoNet team of which I am part are presenting at the Support Northumbria conference next month. We’re presenting a smorgasbord of delights for delegates with my part focusing upon workflows.

We’ve done plenty of work as a team on mapping our workflows but, given the fast-paced world we work in, I’ve not thought through mine as a researcher for a while. I decided to break out the crayons this afternoon, therefore, and think through both what I’m currently doing and how I can make that process more effective.

The first thing I did was to create four columns, reflecting what I consider to be the stages of research I go through:

Inputs
Lenses
Curation
Synthesis

Once I’d done that I placed every web app I use regularly into one of the columns (or ‘other’) and then identified which are core to my productivity. Then I thought how they fit together and how I could hone my workflow. I came up with this:

The grey river thing to the left stands for sources of information whilst the one in the middle for projects (current and potential).

I’ll no doubt have missed out something huge, but it was an interesting process to go through. I realised, for example, that I need to pay for Evernote on a yearly basis (I’ve been paying on an ad-hoc monthly basis) and use it more consistently. Also, I hadn’t carried out the very simple step of auto-feeding my Amplify RSS into Licorize as I had done with my starred twitter items!

Educational philosophy, the zeitgeist, and #purposed

Posted on January 21, 2011 by Doug Belshaw

I had a brief exchange about the difference between the purpose and the philosophy of education with @amichetti on Twitter earlier. Sometimes diagrams are better than 140 characters:

More on this to come: http://purposed.org.uk

Education is easy – in theory! [visualization]

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Doug Belshaw

I can see now that it takes more than having passed through school as a student to understand the education system.* After all, it looks something like the diagram below, right?

Of course those who have worked in educational institutions know that the above is far from the truth. Instead of, for example, research being the bedrock of all that goes on, it is marginalized and distorted. The issues** along the lines linking the elements together show how it’s a messy picture – not in itself a bad thing – and it’s distorted by politics (which is a bad thing) :-p

* Not that you’d know that from talking to your average member of the general public! 😉

** N.B. The reason I didn’t add ‘time’ as a factor in the second diagram is because, as I’ve said to a few people this week, time itself isn’t an issue. It’s priorities – which is a different matter.