Friday, 9 March 2012
Create a comprehensive arts portfolio online via multiple presences.
Written for Visual Arts students interested in digitising and publishing a comprehensive record of their artworks online and for the educators helping them.
The good news is that your Visual Arts educator has helped you to develop a showcase electronic learning portfolio (e-portfolio): in my research project, its two educators chose Carbonmade, because it met these criteria. The service suits the pedagogical aims in South African Visual Arts well, where a portfolio of 35 images is often more than sufficient to cover the learner's body of work for an end-of-year (matric) exhibition, as well as tertiary education applications.
The bad news is that the teachers' online portfolio choice seemed to learners to limit them to publishing 35 images online, thereby preventing the publication of their complete oeuvre! In response, an educator highlighted that learners are not limited to using Carbonmade and should consider creating presences with other services to publish the remainder of their artworks. Students could then create reciprocal links between these services to make them easy for Carbonmade's viewers to find; this is a common practice in the profiles of artists with featured portfolios. To help you identify a service you might want to use, I have listed the four commonly linked types, below:
1. An addition to the Social Network presence you already use
(Popular examples: Facebook Pages and Google+)
The impressionist painter, Valérie Pirlot, provides links to many sites, which include online presences; her blog, Flickr account and a Facebook page, galleries; the Saatchi and Victoria Art, and an academy; the Royal West of England Academy.
The value of featuring all these links is that viewers can select specific aspects of her work that they are interested in viewing. It is also testifies to her professional status and the galleries and academy she associates with.
As a learner, you may already have a Facebook account and creating a Facebook page where you upload your artworks should have the benefits of being very convenient, whilst making it easy to share with your Facebook friends.
Google account holders users should consider using Google+. If your digitized artworks are well-labelled, this may have the benefit of producing better ranked search engine results on the world's most popular search engine, relative to other services.
2. A Photo Sharing Presence
(Popular examples: Flickr, Picasa)
(Popular examples: Blogger and WordPress)
Science fiction concept artist, Marek Tarnawski, provides a link to his blog http://farvus-craft.blogspot.com. His blog was created with Blogger, but you could consider using WordPress or other popular blogging software.
The benefit of choosing to blog for you could include:
4. Another Online Portfolio Service Presence
(Popular examples: behance.net, cghub.com)
Carbonmade is just one of many other online portfolio software services focussed on enabling creatives to publish their online portfolios. Each service provides a distinct combination of affordances to cater for the type of creatives they serve; so it's important to define what you may need before selecting one.
For example, CGHub promotes itself as "an online community where computer graphics artists share their latest work, tips, and tools, network with friends, search jobs, and more." So, if you want to improve your computer graphics skills, this may be useful to join. However, if you want to interact with creative professionals outside of computer graphics illustration and want the best visibility of your online portfolio, you should consider using behance.net.
I hope that this overview was useful for you. If there is a type of service I have missed, please mention it in the comment box below. Or if you have any other guidance, please do share. Thanks!
The good news is that your Visual Arts educator has helped you to develop a showcase electronic learning portfolio (e-portfolio): in my research project, its two educators chose Carbonmade, because it met these criteria. The service suits the pedagogical aims in South African Visual Arts well, where a portfolio of 35 images is often more than sufficient to cover the learner's body of work for an end-of-year (matric) exhibition, as well as tertiary education applications.
The bad news is that the teachers' online portfolio choice seemed to learners to limit them to publishing 35 images online, thereby preventing the publication of their complete oeuvre! In response, an educator highlighted that learners are not limited to using Carbonmade and should consider creating presences with other services to publish the remainder of their artworks. Students could then create reciprocal links between these services to make them easy for Carbonmade's viewers to find; this is a common practice in the profiles of artists with featured portfolios. To help you identify a service you might want to use, I have listed the four commonly linked types, below:
1. An addition to the Social Network presence you already use
(Popular examples: Facebook Pages and Google+)
The impressionist painter, Valérie Pirlot, provides links to many sites, which include online presences; her blog, Flickr account and a Facebook page, galleries; the Saatchi and Victoria Art, and an academy; the Royal West of England Academy.
The value of featuring all these links is that viewers can select specific aspects of her work that they are interested in viewing. It is also testifies to her professional status and the galleries and academy she associates with.
As a learner, you may already have a Facebook account and creating a Facebook page where you upload your artworks should have the benefits of being very convenient, whilst making it easy to share with your Facebook friends.
 |
| Valérie Pirlot's Facebook Page (8 March 2012) |
 |
| Leodor Selenier's Google+ page (8 March 2012) |
2. A Photo Sharing Presence
(Popular examples: Flickr, Picasa)
There are many photo sharing sites listed on Wikipedia and in Valérie's example, she chose Flickr. To learners, the benefit of choosing this service, or similar, includes:
- There is a relatively high limit on the number of images that can be uploaded each month;
- It includes a social networking component making it easy to share photos, comments and notes plus join groups you are interested in;
- You could also upload videos;
- It is compatible with many mobile phone applications, so easy to share to when using your phone's camera.
(Popular examples: Blogger and WordPress)
 |
| Marek Tarnawski's concise Carbonmade profile (8 March 2012) |
Science fiction concept artist, Marek Tarnawski, provides a link to his blog http://farvus-craft.blogspot.com. His blog was created with Blogger, but you could consider using WordPress or other popular blogging software.
The benefit of choosing to blog for you could include:
- There is no limit on the number of images that can be uploaded;
- You could also upload other media (such as videos);
- You can provide descriptions of your working process;
- Viewers can choose to subscribe to your blog;
- You can create reciprocal links with other blogs via a blogroll.
4. Another Online Portfolio Service Presence
(Popular examples: behance.net, cghub.com)
Carbonmade is just one of many other online portfolio software services focussed on enabling creatives to publish their online portfolios. Each service provides a distinct combination of affordances to cater for the type of creatives they serve; so it's important to define what you may need before selecting one.
For example, CGHub promotes itself as "an online community where computer graphics artists share their latest work, tips, and tools, network with friends, search jobs, and more." So, if you want to improve your computer graphics skills, this may be useful to join. However, if you want to interact with creative professionals outside of computer graphics illustration and want the best visibility of your online portfolio, you should consider using behance.net.
 |
| Nook's Carbonmade About page features a button that links to his portfolio on the Behance Network (14 March 2012) |
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
Helping an academic create a more coherent online presence
Written for academic researchers interested in improving their online presence.
Late last year, Laura Czerniewicz worked with Kelsey Wiens and I to review and improve Laura's online presence. This process involved three phases:
Searching for Laura online using the most common search engines (Google, Bing. et al.) showed her Twitter account, old UCT blog and a profile on CET's website. It also revealed that a few of her presentations had been uploaded to Slideshare by other people and an index of her research articles had been automatically generated on Academia.edu. This followed her publishing a profile there (and "forgetting about it, while it developed a life of its own" as she says). The latter was an example of a digital shadow; where an index of articles she had submitted to diverse journals over several years was dynamically created by an online service after her initial contribution.
2 Defining what she would like achieved.
The results of this audit were then combined with ideas on opportunities she could action to improve her digital identity's footprint (which she can pro-actively manage versus a digital shadow that is often a passive reflection of activities) in her online presence plan (generic version).
The most important aim Laura emphasised was that "coherence" should be achieved between her varied professional online presences. To achieve coherence, we developed a set of guidelines for her online identity. This covered; her name, personal and profile descriptions, tagline and the researcher keywords she would try to consistently use for her identity across all her presences.
Another important aim was improve the online visibility of her scholarly output. To support this, she committed to having an active online presence in the following areas; creating and publishing her academic profile and CV, blogging regularly, uploading showcase presentations, publishing micro-updates, sharing social bookmarks and submitting her blog's details to online directories and blog aggregators:
Laura was very busy; even though she was very committed, she struggled to find time to fit this new project between her existing activities. An example of this was when I wrote the first draft of her identity's profile; Laura was very insistent that she should own her profile and re-wrote it. As a rule, I learnt that this is one task a post-graduate student should not be handed! Another challenge posed by Laura's time scarcity is that academia.edu indexed, but did not provide access to original documents. I'm hoping that Laura can find the time to upload these herself, despite it not currently being a high priority.
I then helped her move her old UCT blog to www.lauraczerniewicz.co.za, which had to be hosted off-campus as UCT ICTS did not offer Wordpress hosting in 2011.
Presentation presence
Slideshare is a popular service for academics, and others, to share presentations. Laura had created an account long ago, but had forgotten her username since she had not been using it regularly. She was also concerned that previous uploads of her presentations were poorly tagged and hard to search for. To help, her http://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz account's profile was improved and she uploaded recent presentations to it. She was pleasantly suprised when a presentation on Academic Visibility reached over 6,000 views, following it being featured on Slideshare's homepage!
Microblogging presence
For microblogging, Laura enjoys using Twitter and only tweets in her professional capacity. We had an interesting discussion on the extent of Laura's tweets and Kelsey suggested that a small percentage of these might feature personal interests. Laura has yet to be sold on the idea, however.
Social bookmarking presence
Laura started using Delicious at a time when it had huge news coverage because of the ownership change. She took the initiative to link her Twitter account to Delicious, which now automatically saves interesting URLs directly from her Twitter account.
Online directories and blog aggregation presence
Laura's blog was submitted to the Open Directory Project to improve its visibility. A blog aggregator, Amatomu, is next on Laura's list.
Other negotiations and considerations
Across all these services, the personal and professional line in social media was debated. While Laura is insistent that there is a clear line between the two (i.e. LinkedIn is for professional use, Facebook is personal), there are other UCT academics who use them (especially Facebook) as a joint space. It will be interesting to see whether Laura's views change...
The list of services above is a shortlist from what was considered and it was important for us to negotiate around the "lots that you can do" versus what is feasible. In particular, we defined the minimum that Laura was prepared to do for achieving her objectives.
As a busy academic, Laura also has a low tolerance for technical failure. In choosing services, we had to make sure they were easy-to-use and dependable; Laura would not spend time troubleshooting. Having clearly defined the low hanging fruit and most appropriate online services for Laura to use, we finished defining her online presence plan: each online publication she wanted was listed and a list of tasks and deadlines was defined for each.
Late last year, Laura Czerniewicz worked with Kelsey Wiens and I to review and improve Laura's online presence. This process involved three phases:
- First, we audited her current online presences;
- Second, we defined what she would like achieved;
- Third, we actioned the most important aspects of this by developing her online presence guidelines and implementing a plan for each presence.
Searching for Laura online using the most common search engines (Google, Bing. et al.) showed her Twitter account, old UCT blog and a profile on CET's website. It also revealed that a few of her presentations had been uploaded to Slideshare by other people and an index of her research articles had been automatically generated on Academia.edu. This followed her publishing a profile there (and "forgetting about it, while it developed a life of its own" as she says). The latter was an example of a digital shadow; where an index of articles she had submitted to diverse journals over several years was dynamically created by an online service after her initial contribution.
 |
| @Czernie on Academia.edu (11 January, 2012) |
2 Defining what she would like achieved.
The results of this audit were then combined with ideas on opportunities she could action to improve her digital identity's footprint (which she can pro-actively manage versus a digital shadow that is often a passive reflection of activities) in her online presence plan (generic version).
The most important aim Laura emphasised was that "coherence" should be achieved between her varied professional online presences. To achieve coherence, we developed a set of guidelines for her online identity. This covered; her name, personal and profile descriptions, tagline and the researcher keywords she would try to consistently use for her identity across all her presences.
Another important aim was improve the online visibility of her scholarly output. To support this, she committed to having an active online presence in the following areas; creating and publishing her academic profile and CV, blogging regularly, uploading showcase presentations, publishing micro-updates, sharing social bookmarks and submitting her blog's details to online directories and blog aggregators:
Academic profile and CV presence
We had a in-depth discussion about the extent to which her professional identity should include a personal dimension. While I felt that she should include a personal hobby, she believes her online identity should be purely professional. Although we limited her presences to her academic and professional side, I still think that this is a pity; it limits the opportunity of her profile's viewers to understand her passion for craft and design and potentially discuss this with her...Laura was very busy; even though she was very committed, she struggled to find time to fit this new project between her existing activities. An example of this was when I wrote the first draft of her identity's profile; Laura was very insistent that she should own her profile and re-wrote it. As a rule, I learnt that this is one task a post-graduate student should not be handed! Another challenge posed by Laura's time scarcity is that academia.edu indexed, but did not provide access to original documents. I'm hoping that Laura can find the time to upload these herself, despite it not currently being a high priority.
Blogging presence
The old blogging software Laura used was "clunky and irritating". We decided to change to Wordpress, which was not only user-friendly but could also easily integrate content from her other online accounts.I then helped her move her old UCT blog to www.lauraczerniewicz.co.za, which had to be hosted off-campus as UCT ICTS did not offer Wordpress hosting in 2011.
Presentation presence
Slideshare is a popular service for academics, and others, to share presentations. Laura had created an account long ago, but had forgotten her username since she had not been using it regularly. She was also concerned that previous uploads of her presentations were poorly tagged and hard to search for. To help, her http://www.slideshare.net/laura_Cz account's profile was improved and she uploaded recent presentations to it. She was pleasantly suprised when a presentation on Academic Visibility reached over 6,000 views, following it being featured on Slideshare's homepage!
 |
| Stats for this presentation on Slideshare.net (8 February, 2012) |
Microblogging presence
For microblogging, Laura enjoys using Twitter and only tweets in her professional capacity. We had an interesting discussion on the extent of Laura's tweets and Kelsey suggested that a small percentage of these might feature personal interests. Laura has yet to be sold on the idea, however.
Social bookmarking presence
Laura started using Delicious at a time when it had huge news coverage because of the ownership change. She took the initiative to link her Twitter account to Delicious, which now automatically saves interesting URLs directly from her Twitter account.
Online directories and blog aggregation presence
Laura's blog was submitted to the Open Directory Project to improve its visibility. A blog aggregator, Amatomu, is next on Laura's list.
Other negotiations and considerations
Across all these services, the personal and professional line in social media was debated. While Laura is insistent that there is a clear line between the two (i.e. LinkedIn is for professional use, Facebook is personal), there are other UCT academics who use them (especially Facebook) as a joint space. It will be interesting to see whether Laura's views change...
The list of services above is a shortlist from what was considered and it was important for us to negotiate around the "lots that you can do" versus what is feasible. In particular, we defined the minimum that Laura was prepared to do for achieving her objectives.
As a busy academic, Laura also has a low tolerance for technical failure. In choosing services, we had to make sure they were easy-to-use and dependable; Laura would not spend time troubleshooting. Having clearly defined the low hanging fruit and most appropriate online services for Laura to use, we finished defining her online presence plan: each online publication she wanted was listed and a list of tasks and deadlines was defined for each.
3 Actioning an "online presence plan".
Laura, Kelsey and I then worked at creating a coherent identity across Laura's online presences that showcases her academic work outside traditional channels (like academic journals). At the end we used this experience to turn her personal plan into a generic one, which we hope other academics will refer to... and, most importantly, apply!
Please give us your thoughts in the comment box below, thanks :).
Laura, Kelsey and I then worked at creating a coherent identity across Laura's online presences that showcases her academic work outside traditional channels (like academic journals). At the end we used this experience to turn her personal plan into a generic one, which we hope other academics will refer to... and, most importantly, apply!
Please give us your thoughts in the comment box below, thanks :).
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