Saturday, March 14, 2009

Using Netvibes In a business Intelligence class

This semester one of the modules I coordinate is a Business Intelligence module taken by level 3 (final year) undergraduates. The assessment is producing an analytical business report about a company (together with a reflection on the student's information literacy in carrying out the assignment). As part of a session on environmental scanning & keeping up to date I put together a Netvibes page illustrating how you can use a free application like Netvibes to monitor news. Then I asked the students to create their own Netvibes page, with the aim of identifying sources that have news feeds, to help them monitor their company whilst they are preparting their assignment.
My Netvibes page for this class is at http://www.netvibes.com/inf304#General It has feeds from some general business sources (e.g. a Financial Times twitter feed and news feed), specialist sources (e.g. Talking Retail news), offical agencies (e.g. the London Stock Exchange and Ofcom) and local news (in this case, the Sheffield Star). I also put on feeds from a couple of blogs (Karen Blakeman's and Phil Bradley's), a journal (Business Information Review) and a website (FUMSI) that have information about business information. The tab on this Netvibes page has links to pages that list some RSS feeds (e.g. the relevant page on the FT site). In case you wonder why the page is called inf304, that's the module code.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Killiney, Ireland, September 2003.

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