From cave drawings to smoke signals, from the Pony Express to e-mail; the need to communicate efficiently has driven many technological advances, and so the EBS Track have decided to embrace two of the newer communication channels available to us, namely Twitter and LinkedIn.
Twitter
Most of you should be aware of the Twitter ‘craze’ that is currently going on, but in case you're not a tweeter then here's a link to Wikipedia so you can get a bit of background (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter). Twitter allows you to post status updates, bits of information, pictures, videos etc for people to see. People can see these either by searching for you or 'following' you. Another way to get the message out there is to also use # tags. # tags are a way of denoting something other people may search for i.e. if you search for #alliance2012 you would find all the tweets in the whole of twitter land where someone has used that # tag.
The EBS track is going to use it to put out short notices, primarily about #alliance2012 rather than cluttering up the EBS list serve. We can tweet quickly and easily about what's going at the Alliance. Secondly, you can do it from a variety of phones, tablets, pc's etc so no matter what interface you're using you can still get the information. Because twitter limits your messages to 140 characters, they're small messages and don't take up too much data download on your phone. And lastly, it’s just another channel for us to be able to communicate with you lovely people.
So please come follow us at www.twitter.com our username is @HEUGeBS
LinkedIn
We have set up a LinkedIn Group called EBS Track - Higher Education User Group which any of you can join. LinkedIn is a social network similar to Facebook where you request people link in with you, but its more aimed at a business environment and your links tend to be business colleagues (there's no embarrassing pictures of you when you were at university on it). We thought it would be a nice place for members of the EBS group to ... well link together.
www.linkedin.com
Group link: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?about=&gid=4058116
EBS Blog
The EBS PAG are going to use this more often to update and announce things. We will still use the list serve to make important announcements, but will also post it to the blog.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to email us, tweet us, link up with us ... whichever way suits you!
Thanks
EBS PAG