Simply replace the bold text with your document’s url and style the iframe with css.
This appears not to work very well with actual Google documents though, as it appends a load of navigation detritus. But it seems to work well for regular hosted documents.
I don’t like the term ‘gamification’. Maybe I’ve missed the point, but if we have to turn something into a game doesn’t that suggest it’s not fit for purpose anyway?
Eight or nine years ago a man from Immersive Education introduced my colleagues and me to Kar2ouche. He explained it was the result of some Oxford University research into why children enjoyed computer games but not educational software. He finished by admitting that the findings stated the bleeding obvious: games are fun because the kids are in control. It was as simple as that.
He didn’t feel the need to call it ‘gamification’. To do so now is to suggest it’s a Cool New Thing: it’s not; it’s just common sense.
We know from the pain of public consultations that there’s little point involving people if they feel they have no stake in it. If the thing I’m expected to do isn’t relevant enough to engage me in the first place, why am I expected to do it at all? Bribing me might elicit some answers but it probably won’t encourage much meaningful engagement from me.
In other words, sugar-coating something might make it taste better but it doesn’t improve the process. For example, by turning voting into a game you might get more people to vote, but that doesn’t mean you’ve improved the democratic process. Those voters might still feel alienated after the election, meaning that next time you just have to be even more creative if you want them to turn out on polling day.
You don’t build a car from a cake recipe and ask someone to rectify it later. No: you make sure the processes and environment are optimum in the first place. Either that or you’ve decided already that you want a cake and not a car.
I’ve not posted on this site for a couple of months, partly because I haven’t had the time or energy and partly because I was experiencing severe technical difficulties with it (and didn’t have the time or energy for those either).
WordPress was playing silly buggers; the front end wasn’t working well and the back end was even more broken. At first it appeared to be a problem with plugins but eventually became apparent that it probably wasn’t. In fact it seems that the latest version of WordPress (and plugins) relies heavily on php5, and my host was still on php4.
It’s taken me since Christmas to discover that was the problem; if you think WordPress is a walk in the park, watch out for the black ice.
Anyway, enough rambling and bad metaphors; I’m off to bed. Good night.
I supported the idea of strategies and policies for Twitter or social media when it was evident that people in managerial positions needed a solid, reassuring case for allowing their communications staff to use those tools. But I hope things have moved on now.
I keep hearing people talking about how they’ve written a ‘set of Twitter protocols’ or ‘a social media policy’. They cover things like what to tweet and what not to tweet, how often to tweet it and the ‘right way’ to use Twitter. (If you think you know the answer to that last one please keep it to yourself.)
Do we really need policies and protocols for every aspect of our job? If so, why are people employing us? Surely we use social media tools only if appropriate, if doing so helps deliver our communications goals and in compliance with our organisation’s existing codes of practice? Just like any other tools for communicating. When was the last time you saw a six-page document detailing how to use a telephone, what not to say on it and how often you should ring people? (Ok, in some lines of work (such as call centres) there will be protocols for using the phone, but you get my drift.)
I tried writing a social media policy myself recently. I started with the intention of providing broad concepts to help people communicate confidently online (such as ‘think about your audience’ rather than ‘don’t tweet more than fourteen times a minute’), and abandoned it when I realised I was simply reiterating what was already in our contracts and organisational policies; and what was, on the whole, common sense borne of experience.
Instead I wrote a guide to blogging and social media that aims to give colleagues some advice but tries to avoid a ‘right way’ of doing it (it is a document of good practice, not a policy). If communicating is part of someone’s job then we should trust them to do it appropriately; if they don’t then there are management protocols already at our disposal for dealing with them.
I’m sorry for the odd and user-unfriendly behaviour of this blog recently. I am aware of it and I will try and sort it out soon.
I upgraded the WordPress installation recently and it seems that a number of the plugins are no longer compatible and are causing havoc with my customised templates. I’ll try and get on top of it soon, but you may need to bear with me for a while.
The UK government wants public sector reform, and a big part of its plan involves transparency. However, some datasets on data.gov.uk are too shoddy to be useful. I suspect if people were managed and treated better they might take more interest in the quality of their work.
(I’ve been blogging about open data on my Open Local Data Blog, but I’m feeling a bit of a fraud so this time I’m writing about it here, where I can do what I like.)
Anyway, I just stumbled across yet another data.gov.uk dataset that has no contextual information:
Although the dataset itself holds some accidental clues (for example, in the April 2010 dataset words like ‘pharmacy’ and ‘Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames’ appear in some of the cells), there is still nothing that deliberately and explicitly conveys its heritage; I’m still only presuming that it came from South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust.
If people can’t tell what a set data is then there’s no reason for them to use it. Whether or not you’re a proponent of open data, it’s hard to argue that there’s any point publishing something useless.
So why publish?
I can only presume that the people publishing this don’t understand or care about it; that they were simply doing the minimal that they were expected to, because they had been given no reasonable explanation, incentive or power to understand why they were doing it or why they should want to do it.
That can’t be a good way to manage a ‘reformed’ public service.
I’ve just read on the cover of Metro that the details of Prince William’s wedding ceremony were released ‘exclusively on social networking site Twitter’. Even Clarence House is bypassing traditional news outlets; so are we finally seeing the demise of ‘traditional’ media? No, probably not.
The thing is I didn’t discover this news on Twitter. For a start I don’t follow Clarence House, because frankly I’m not that interested in them (and even if I did follow everyone I found interesting I wouldn’t have time left to breathe).
But I am interested in seeing a variety of news stories; if I read only the news I gather myself then I will only ever see what I want to, and never discover anything particularly new or challenging. Curated news is still king for me, be that online or in print (and I’ve yet to find an online newspaper lying discarded in a train carriage).
Also I need to feel confident that I’ll find at least something of interest, and I want it to be written well. That takes skill in both writing and editing, and at the moment it remains the professional media that instills in me the most confidence in those areas.
Anyway, you’ve probably read far too much hot air on this subject; and so I say goodnight.
Today I got an invitation to join DotGovLabs (currently in private beta), which aims to ‘nurture digital innovation from outside government from the people who know digital’.
It’s hard to figure out what it’s for, and if you’re not a member the website (linked to from their Twitter account) gives nothing away. However, if you are a member the website tells you a bit more. From the front page:
“The Innovation Hub is a virtual space enabling digital innovation of public services.”
That would be worth putting on the public page too. Anyway, from the ‘About us’ page:
“DotGovLabs is a programme provided by Directgov, with wide participation from across government. It aims to nurture digital innovation from outside government from the people who know digital.
“The DotGovLabs Innovation Hub is aligned with a new way of thinking about the role of government that reflects the opportunities presented by a digital world. By looking at a problem from an online perspective, with fresh combinations of people and collaborative ways of working, innovations can be made for the benefit of all. It is the digital opportunities that government must now seize with solutions focused on the outcomes for the citizen and making use of the rapidly changing digital environment.”
It’s a little flaky at the moment: people’s websites in their user profiles aren’t hyperlinked and a mysterious audio clip plays automatically on the ‘about us’ page with no way of switching it off (incredibly bad practice), but I’ll forgive them because it is still in private beta.
It looks interesting though, and I’m curious as to how successful it will be. I hope it turns out to be an innovation that I find exciting enough to get involved with.
Invitations can be acquired by asking an existing member.
This table compares school ages in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the USA.
I created this a few years ago, and am publishing it here simply because I had trouble sharing it from where I’d put it previously. Any thoughts are of course welcome though.
Just to remind you that Mitch Benn’s ode to the BBC was released today. GO AND BUY IT.
Of course you don’t have to buy it, but ‘I’m proud of the BBC‘ is a nice catchy feelgood tune about a great British institution and it’s only 79p from iTunes – possibly even less elsewhere. What good reason have you not to?
If you want to know why he wrote it, there’s more about the song on his blog.
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